Richard Fidler

Melissa Lukashenko is my guest today.

Melissa is a guri author of Bundjalung and European Heritage.

Her novel Too Much Lip won Australia's biggest literary prize, the Miles Franklin Award, in 2019.

Less well known, perhaps, is the fact that Melissa has also won the game show Millionaire Hot Seat and back in the day, a bunch of karate competitions.

I spoke with her in 2023, just after the release of her fabulous novel Eden Glassy.

Melissa's book is set both in the Brisbane of 2024 and in the same lands in the 1840s and 50s.

This was a transformative moment in our history, an era of increasingly violent frontier warfare.

But when many local Yagra people were still living on their own lands by their own law, hoping that the white invaders would hurry up and take ourselves back home.

I found Eden Glassie a revelatory book.

It changed the way I see the city I live in.

And I'm so happy to be able to speak to you about it, Melissa, and about your own life.

Hello.

Hello.

Let's start with two of the central characters in the novel, Mulan Yin and Nita.

Tell me something about them.

Malinian is from saltwater country and he talks a lot about the Barra Garra.

Tell me about that and its meaning and significance to him.

Well, when he's learning the way to be a man in his community, he catches a really big fish that he's really proud of.

How do the adults around him react?

And it's a lesson that, like other lessons he learns in the book, isn't told explicitly, but one he's got to kind of glean from just putting his mind and experience to the test a little.