Edenglassie, by Melissa Lucashenko

Melissa Lucashenko has written a cracking follow-up to her Miles Franklin award winner Too Much Lip.

Award winning Goorie author Melissa Lucashenko's new novel Edenglassie alternates between two time frames. The first chapter set in 2024 (the year of Brisbane's bicentenary) introduces Eddie Blanket, a centenarian Indigenous woman who has taken a fall. She's a flinty old trooper and has seen more than her fair share of trouble. She's saved by a group of passing foreign students and taken to hospital. On the hospital ward she meets  journalist Dartmouth Rice. Running into Eddie, he thinks he's snapped up a ripper of a story, and she indulges the journo with some embellished tales. Through Eddie, we meet her feisty granddaughter Winona. She's a sharp tongued activist who tells it like it is. When Eddie's doctor, Johnny, meets Winona he's smitten. It's almost a case of Shakespeare's Taming of the Shrew: can he satisfy her many criticisms and win her over?

The major storyline takes place in 1854. Goorie man Mulanyin has left his home in Yugambeh Country and now stays with his law-brother Murree in Yagara Country, the area that is now Brisbane. There he meets the beautiful Nita who is a servant for the white Petrie family. They treat her well, but condescending attitudes nonetheless prevail. Meanwhile, trouble swirls around them. The white invaders – “dagai” they are called in the local language – are intent on grabbing as much land as they can, despoiling Country and over farming it, ignoring traditional ways of preserving the environment's status quo. Some whites, such as the Petrie family, are decent enough, but a murderous racism is on the rampage. Mulanyin and his family hope that the rule of law – Goorie law – can prevail, and the white invaders will retreat, but that looks less and less likely every day. When Mulanyin attends the botched execution by hanging of resistance fighter and lawman Dundalli, he is deeply shaken. While he dreams that he and Nita will have lots of children to replace his fellow countrymen who have been murdered, the walls start closing in on him.

Edenglassie is an ambitious epic giving an alternative Australian history, one seen through First Nations eyes. The novel excels in creating a believable mid-19th century mise-en-scene. The descriptions of Country – its flora and fauna – are wonderfully rich, almost lush. The cast of Goorie characters are dynamic and three dimensional, with deep inner lives. The story of Mulanyin and Nita very much carries the reader away, hoping that their lives will be happy and fruitful. The contemporary narrative, set in 2024, is often brutally funny and the two timelines end up coming together in the most ingenious way.

Razor sharp and brilliantly imagined. A book that all Australians should read.  

Edenglassie, by Melissa Lucashenko. Published by University of Queensland Press. $32.99

NOV23