Richard Fidler

Don't ever go into the garage.

That's one lesson.

That's one lesson from your book.

Don't ever go into that garage.

You won't like what you find out in that garage.

Professional Pilots Rumour Network.

That was a thing, right.

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.