Books
Melissa Lucashenko
Not Quite White in the Head
Melissa Lucashenko is one of this country’s most acclaimed contemporary novelists. She is also a highly respected and loved Goorie author within the First Nations writing community. After reading her debut novel, Steam Pigs (1997), I knew I was in the presence of a writer who would shift and shake the ground beneath the canon of Australian literature, which has too often been nostalgic for the ruins of the colonial nation, with little if any ability to confront the truths of the violence and attempted dispossession of Aboriginal nations and the Country we nurture.
Steam Pigs was followed by a series of powerful novels, with Lucashenko hitting remarkable literary heights with her three most recent books, Mullumbimby, Too Much Lip (a personal favourite), and most recently, Edenglassie, all published by University of Queensland Press. Each book is as tender as it is abrasive. Lucashenko, driven by a sense of generosity rather than animosity – as she is sometimes mistakenly represented – has through her fiction offered all Australians, Black and white, the opportunity to reflect. She asks us to challenge and engage with a genuine truth-telling project beyond the sloganeering that has quickly managed to co-opt a serious discussion of colonial violence into a shallow branding exercise.
As inferred by the title of this collection of essays, Not Quite White in the Head, this country suffers an intellectual affliction. Lucashenko’s is at times an adversarial voice and yet one that seeks engagement beyond the Aboriginal community. In the introduction to the collection, she makes it the clear that her ultimate aim as a writer is inclusion, not separatism. Lucashenko asks that all Australians “join us in a better future”. She is writing for and speaking to “a decent, mindful human who cares about your neighbours and the earth, and acts accordingly”.
To become a mindful human, it is necessary to confront truths and to accept shared responsibility for them. A contemporary blight on this country is the over-representation of Aboriginal people, including small children, within the incarceration system. The reality of deaths in custody, be they in a police cell, the back of a prison van or on the street, is that if there is one constant in colonial/Aboriginal relationships in the country, now 250 years in the making, it is the reality that Aboriginal bodies have been abused, beaten and killed by white Australia.
To read the essays, “Who Let The Dogs Out”, on the death of Mulrunji Doomadgee on Palm Island in 2004, and “A Voice from the Rooftop of Boggo Road Prison”, is an exercise in confrontation and anger. Both essays are also deeply sad. To feel a need to write that Mulrunji Doomadgee deserved to live, that he was a relatively young Aboriginal man entitled to a life, is an act of personal humiliation for me. I shouldn’t need to plead for basic human dignity being afforded to Aboriginal people. And yet, I feel a need to do so, because Lucashenko reminds me that we, as Aboriginal people, are never granted decency. We are required to fight for it every day of our lives.
Other essays in the collection are about the writing and reading process itself. Edenglassie (2023) is a multi-awarded novel that deals with colonial violence of the past and the contemporary legacies that damage this country and Aboriginal Country both. The fascinating essay, “On Writing Edenglassie”, provides an insight not so much into the creative process itself – although it is there by inference on every page. Lucashenko is concerned with the ethical, emotional and intellectual issues central to any Aboriginal writer who chooses to create a story, as within Aboriginal communities, our stories are shared stories. Lucashenko reminds me, as a fiction writer, that the responsibilities for my craft are not for myself alone or my readers. I am responsible to all Aboriginal people who have come before me and those who will follow.
Lucashenko is generous with other writers whom she discusses in the collection. The short essay, “On Keri Hulme”, is a tribute to the great Māori writer who was awarded the Booker Prize in 1985 for The Bone People, a book that Lucashenko describes simply and accurately as “strange and wonderful”. While Hulme is not a truly “forgotten” writer, it is timely to be reminded of how groundbreaking her work is and how vital she is within the global canon of First Peoples literature.
The essay “On Bitin’ Back”, written about the Kamilaroi author Vivienne Cleven, is a song of respect and recovery. Too few Australians are aware of this writer. As Lucashenko reminds us, Cleven was raised “like a lot of Aboriginal people … to expect a life of manual labour and poverty. Her family were no strangers to dirt floors and empty bellies”.
It is difficult to convey the depth of emotion I feel when re-reading this sentence. I have worked extensively on writing produced by Aboriginal women, much of it written at kitchen tables with a blunt lead pencil and a few scraps of paper. Vivienne Cleven and every Aboriginal woman who has ever put pen to paper, who tapped away at a shonky typewriter or a borrowed computer, are my mentors and heroes. And of course, Melissa Lucashenko is among them.
UQP, 256pp, $39.99 (hardback)
This article was first published in the print edition of The Saturday Paper on November 1, 2025 as "Not Quite White in the Head".
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