'Reflect, listen and learn': Melissa Lucashenko busts colonial myths and highlights Indigenous heroes

• Melissa Lucashenko’s latest novel, Edenglassie, takes the reader on a journey through magnificent and heartbreaking dual narratives set five generations apart.
• Review: Edenglassie – Melissa Lucashenko (UQP) Lucashenko gifts us with characters impossible to not to invest in.
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  With wit and tenderness, Miles Franklin winner Melissa Lucashenko writes back to the 'whiteman's world'

It’s Granny Eddie’s world

• The first character we meet is Granny Eddie, who has been hospitalised after a fall.
• Winona laments not seeing her Granny Eddie enough, while also trying to find a job, disrupt the colony and make sure her granny is safe and cared for.
• Respectful, kind and considerate, he is trying his best to care for Granny Eddie – and finds himself pushing professional boundaries as he falls head over heels for fiery Winona.
• She and Dr Johnny have much to learn from each other as they bond over their care for Granny Eddie.

Shifting time

• Lucashenko transports you, shifting through time.
• In 1844, we meet Mulanyin, saltwater man, whose inner complexities are explored in depth as he learns the Law and lessons from Country and Ancestors.
• With that thought, the boy had the electric realisation that all his life he had been eating the decisions of his Ancestors.
• With that thought, the boy had the electric realisation that all his life he had been eating the decisions of his Ancestors.
• I am reminded of the poem, The Past, by the late Oodgeroo Noonuccal:
  Let no one say the past is dead.
• Haunted by tribal memories, I know
  This little now, this accidental present
  Is not the all of me, whose long making
  Is so much of the past.

‘Your body is not your own’

• In the present, Winona and Granny Eddie interact and relate with Māori mob, through shared understandings of birthing practices and opposition to white cultural appropriation.
• I found myself laughing, crying and fighting off goosebumps as I read.
• There were moments when I had to put the book down, to sit with what I was reading.
• It is clear Lucashenko has done extensive research to position this historical fiction through past and present Magandjin localities.
• This is further evidenced by Lucashenko’s extensive acknowledgments and thanks to contributors and knowledge holders in the book’s author notes.