Chapter 1: What inspired Melissa Lucashenko to write Edenglassie?
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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.
Well, yeah, they're the pivotal romantic pair in the 1850s. Mullinyan is a young tribal man. He's come up from the Gold Coast area, Yugumbir land, to go through ceremony in Woolloongabba, which is now on the south side of Brisbane. He gets stuck in Brisbane and is given into the care of the Yaggara people. and adopted by the Agra headman and his wife.
But his love and the woman who becomes his wife is Nita. And Nita has grown up in a different fashion. She's been adopted by a white family, the Petrie family. And she's Christian. So the two of them represent a meeting of the new Christian Aboriginal life and the coming out of a very tribal existence.
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Chapter 2: How does Melissa's mixed heritage influence her writing?
the British came here and claimed to bring civilization. And I can't remember which of the Greek or Roman writers said it, but there's a famous quote that said they made a wilderness and called it peace. And from a Guri point of view, that's what happened. You know, there was a paradise here, at least on the East Coast. It was a paradise with abundant water, abundant food, abundant fish,
art, culture, sovereignty, governance, theology, and the British sailed in and proceeded to lay waste to it and call it civilisation, which is basically why I write. However, my task as an author is to bring love and joy and hope to the stories of what can arise out of that.
Nita and Malinian are fictional characters, but in the novel their lives are intertwined with this historical family, the Petrie family, who come from Scotland to Moreton Bay. How did you first discover the story of Tom Petrie?
I think it was probably through reading the reminiscences of Tom Petrie, the memoir that his daughter compiled when Tom was an old, old man and, you know, seen as a venerable citizen and someone, you know, one of the last remaining white people with memories of that colonial era. And, yeah, that's a fascinating book and it was just begging to be fictionalised.
It took me 20 years to do it because Petrie... although he was reflecting as a very old man. And it was a first-hand experience of Brisbane in the 1840s, the 1850s, right through to the turn of the century, probably. I think he died in the very early 1900s, about the time my grandmother was born, north of Brisbane.
So, yeah, just hearing it from the horse's mouth and hearing it from someone who actually understood Yuggera culture and language very fluently.
How did he understand that? What kind of connections did he have with local people, local landowners here?
He had a very ordinary human connection because he was a young child in Brisbane. He had been born overseas and arrived here, I think, as a seven or eight year old. But from the age of seven or eight, he was running around with the Aboriginal kids, you know, playing with them, fishing with them, yarning with them, going for eggs in the bush, no doubt, and, you
So he grew up very much bicultural and, you know, the Petrie family had to go and send for him quite often because he'd be staying in the camp when he should have been back home at Petrie by it and he just preferred to be sitting around the fire, you know, with his Aboriginal mates. So he was an initiated man.
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Chapter 3: Who are the central characters in Edenglassie and what do they represent?
I think it was either an equivalent of a tribal marking where the men were proud to be associated with Petrie, or alternatively, it could have been a protection. Because in the era we're talking about, 1850s, 1860s, the native police were just death squads running riot wherever white pastoralists wanted... blackfellas killed or rounded up and sent away, but very often killed unlawfully.
And to have a P on your arm and to be able to say, no, I belong to the Maramba Downs, I'm one of Petrie's men, that would have been a kind of protection and a passport. So, you know, there's... As with all of this historical inquiry... And cultural inquiry, you can't just stop at first impressions.
If I just stopped and said, oh, Petrie was a bastard who branded his Aboriginal workers, that would have been only a tiny fraction of the story. You've got to dig deeper. And so I spent four years through the pandemic, through the bushfires, you know, through the floods, digging deeper. And, yeah, there's so many fascinating stories. I could have written three Eden glasses.
LAUGHTER
What did you learn about the kind of place that Brisbane was in the 1850s?
One of the first things I learnt was how tiny it was. Like 1840 to 1855, you're talking about a white population of between one and maybe 3,000. It's a tiny, it's basically a village or a cluster of villages around the river, you know, North Brisbane, South Brisbane, Fortitude Valley.
So the size of the place, I was really lucky because I lived in Tonga in 1997 and Nuku'alofa was a small dusty town a long way from the Western world and so that gave me some insights into life in a a town where there's pigs running all over the dirt roads, where people are living in villages and sometimes congregating in central areas, where the church is incredibly important.
So I think that was a great gift to me as an author to have that experience. And it was a very violent place, you know. Again, this... Freud would have a field day. The British rock up with their... I call them sufferers in the novel. They're rocked up with their convicts in chains, treated as subhuman basically, as scum, as irredeemable scum.
They're starved and whipped and just treated abominably. and came here and started talking about the savages which it's it'd be laughable if it wasn't so funny but being funny is you know a big part of the book too it's you can't you can't write about this stuff and um and not find veins of humor in in the ridiculousness of it all
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Chapter 4: What historical context does Edenglassie explore?
Yeah, I think all First Nations people do and I imagine historians do as well. But, yeah, we are always, you know, wandering around thinking what, What game animals would have been farmed here? What fish could you have caught here? What songs were sung here? What do those cliffs at Kangaroo Point, you know, that's where the rainbow serpent slithered through to the bay.
And, you know, you see the abseilers on the cliffs there and climbing up and climbing up that big snake slithering track, things like that. So, yeah, that's very natural and normal for all Aboriginal people, I think. And then the other thing, yeah, I had to have a triple vision in the book because I had to look at the colonial era and what was life like then? What was work like?
You know, what was love like? What would Nita, as a Christianised Aboriginal girl living in a Scottish family in this small, dusty outpost of empire, what would she have asked herself about Mullinyin? And so I had her reflecting at one point, you know, had Mullinyin...
ever seen a piano you know had he ever been in a church all these kinds of questions about what was fairly normal to her but what was completely abnormal to him and he's got this um this fear of entering the petrie house It's pretty unusual for Aboriginal people to be invited into a white person's house anyway and in parts of Queensland still is.
I was talking to my mate from Palm Island this morning and I remember when we were young together and we were at university at Griffith. And she was telling me that she'd never been inside a white person's house until she went to university, you know.
So having to cast my mind back to 1855 and think, well, what would Mullinyan think about these very straight walls in this straight-edged square box that the Petries lived in as opposed to the soft, round room that is an ompi? And it's a great joy and privilege of a writer to be able to spend time daydreaming about this kind of thing.
And it's the task of the writer to bring that to an audience in a way that's surprising and revelatory, as you said.
This is your seventh book, Eden Glassie. Give me a sense about what was going on in your own life as you were writing this book.
Oh, God.
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