“Lucashenko is a Goorie author of Bundjalung and European heritage.
She has written numerous award winning fiction and non-fiction books for teenagers and adults. Her novel Too Much Lip won the 2019 Miles Franklin award. Mullumbimby, 2013, won the Fiction category of the Queensland Literary Awards and is memorably readable.
Lucashenko’s talent for wry humour is evident in some of her titles: the novel Too Much Lip, 2018, and Not Quite White in the Head, 2025, which combines essays and journalism.
Her 2023 novel Edenglassie (briefly a colonial name for the part of Brisbane known now as Newstead) tells two indigenous stories, set 5 generations apart.
Lucashenko is a consummate story teller. She combines comedy and tragedy, to draw us into a complex tale of current and historical events, some factual and some fictional, bringing the story to an unpredictable, poignant, and remarkable conclusion.
The popular device of setting 2 stories apart in time doesn’t always work, but Lucashenko uses the trope so skillfully that it is easy to move between the two. And the central characters, Mulanyin and Eddie, are full of qualities that are equally sympathetic, stubborn, vulnerable and funny. Granny Eddie Blanket is unforgettable, someone we might like to meet, provocative though she may be.
Lucashenko’s use of humour is just one of her great gifts, telling of events that are frequently painful and confronting with her unique style, where nothing is simple or straightforward.
Above all, she writes beautifully:
His cries reached across the river to the frogs and owls in the Hollow…the fish asleep in the river took his mourning cries into their dreams. In the scrub just south of Kangaroo Point, the dingoes heard him, and their neck hairs quivered. Knowing the sound of Death intimately, they stood, and in respect for Mulanyin’s loss they pointed their noses at the moon, answering his terrible grief with their own.. The howls of man and dog echoed over Darragh’s Paddock, reaching the Kurilpa village in a symphony of sorrow for the slain.
Edenglassie is a highly recommended read, with the minor criticism that a glossary would have been helpful.
Lucashenko is an outstanding talent in the rich world of indigenous writing.To learn more, go to Melissa-Lucashenko.com”
