UQP

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

Retrieved on: 
Wednesday, October 18, 2023
People, Old age, UQP, First Nations, Native, Female, Black Lives Matter, Tobacco, Family, Oodgeroo Noonuccal, Community, Frontier war, Stolen Generations, Fruit, Story Bridge, Crying, Opium, Turtle, Aborigine, Heart, Law, Human voice, Man, Human, System, Haus, The Past, Brisbane River, Australia Day, Mental, Genocide, Essay, Heel, Melissa, Complex, Violence, Australian frontier wars, Life, Soil, Research, Melissa Lucashenko, Time, Reading, Franklin, Whaling, Book, Animal husbandry, Entertainment, Porcelain, Typesetting, Nursing, Drug, Country, Blak, Yagara, Didgeridoo

Melissa Lucashenko’s latest novel, Edenglassie, takes the reader on a journey through magnificent and heartbreaking dual narratives set five generations apart.

Key Points: 
  • 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.
  • Read more:
    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.

What does it mean to play sport on First Nations land? Ellen van Neerven explores sovereignty and survival on the sporting field

Retrieved on: 
Friday, May 5, 2023
Perfect Score, Sport, Diamond, Poetry, Face, Aborigine, Survival, Darumbal, Fire, Guilt, Identity, UQP, Recreation, Human, Flood, Hearing, Love, Reading, First Nations, Racism, Literature, Culture, Donell, McQuire, Virginia, Trauma, Football, Creative industries, Toy, Entertainment, Jewellery, Country, Indigenous peoples

This is an ugly book that was born of the ugly language I grew up hearing in this country.

Key Points: 
  • This is an ugly book that was born of the ugly language I grew up hearing in this country.
  • This book is me scratching my way out of the scrap of the schoolyard, just trying to stay alive.
  • Review: Personal Score: Sport, Culture, Identity – Ellen van Neerven (UQP) Weaving together race, Indigeneity, sports, sexuality, gender, class and Country, they offer something no sport historian has.

Prominent and personal Black sporting moments

    • The sporting field as a site has offered many iconic moments for mob, both in victory and as victims of racial violence visited upon us – from spectators, selectors, and sporting clubs and associations.
    • And with Aboriginal men’s innumerable, yet memorable, defiant stances against racism in both rugby league and Aussie rules.
    • Van Neerven doesn’t visit those familiar iconic moments.
    • Instead, they take us into the private moments they’ve experienced as a soccer player and as a queer non-binary Blackfulla growing up in Brisbane.

Strategising survival on the sporting field

    • In reading their story, I felt perhaps I had missed something in not loving the game like they do.
    • Van Neerven most powerfully demonstrates their skills – as a writer and soccer player – in the chapter titled “Skills”.
    • And van Neerven honours Black theorising throughout the text, as they make sense of survival, sovereignty and sporting fields.
    • With Perfect Score, van Neerven reminds us that sport, for Blackfullas – pre- and post-1788 – has never been just for recreation.