Under the Skin

When I cast my gaze back over my university education, I find it somewhat startling that it was within the academy that I made a place to relate to the Aboriginal part of my identity. The university has been, and continues to be, a place with such a propensity for holistic violence towards those relegated to the margins. And yet it was there that it felt like I was being exposed to discussions of fully realised Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples for the first time in my life, and it awakened a hunger in this body to understand the ancestral legacy I carry with me. In approaching the task of reviewing a book like Edenglassie, I bring certain relational entanglements and epistemologies that have been cultivated within the rigid frameworks of my disciplinary training in literary studies. Which is as good a place as any to start, but also, I think, a bad place to end such reckoning. 

In Edenglassie – widely celebrated on the prize circuit since its publication – Melissa Lucashenko has woven a tapestry that will doubtless reward revisitation, its threads linking characters across time and the hidden textures of its underside revealing the finer details of connectivity. The novel takes place across two braided timelines – emphatically, two love stories – one in 1855, the other in 2024. The historical timeline in 1855 centres on Mulanyin, a young Yugumbeh man living off Country in the Yagara/Kurilpa community in central Magandjin (Brisbane). The reader sees actual historical figures through Mulanyin’s eyes. These include the Turrwan Dundalli, a freedom fighter and the last person in Queensland to be publicly executed in a gruesomely botched spectacle, and Dalapai, a law man who, due to his close longstanding relationship with Andrew Petrie, offered Country to the latter’s son to establish his homestead, Murrumba. Mulanyin meets Nita, domestic servant to the Petries, a Scottish migrant family known as the first ‘freely settled’ people in Magandjin. Despite being the first white baby born in the Magandjin area, Tom, the youngest Petrie, is in fact also an initiated man, all but assimilated into Aboriginal cultural society. Tom thus straddles these two worlds: one embedded in colonial capitalism, another where he has learned the Laws and languages of local Aboriginal communities.  

The contemporary timeline coincides with the year of Magandjin/Brisbane’s bicentenary – of John Oxley’s (second) sailing up the Warrar where he went on to stake colonial claim on Turrbal and Yuggera land – and centres on Granny Eddie Blanket, who has a fall. Her hospitalisation brings together her firecracker Aboriginal rights activist granddaughter, Winona, and Doctor Johnny Newman, Eddie’s attending hospital physician and a man connecting with his Aboriginal roots. Through most of the novel Granny Eddie is gacked to her eyeballs on pethidine, which makes the yarns she spins for the austere journalist Dartmouth ‘Darto’ Rice especially delightful, as he attempts to extricate from her a story – her story as Brisbane’s oldest Goorie – for the bicentenary commemorations. Just under the surface, however, is a politics of refusal. With the cheek of knowing he is taking her at face value, Granny Eddie recognises her own right to opacity in the face of the extractivist-settler type in Darto and exploits his sense of entitlement to her story. Rejecting an image of frailty and senility, she remains razor sharp, even on opioids, firing offhand and incisive, observationally witty zingers (about, for instance, the ‘cultural awareness seminar’ that has resulted in her ‘magically acquiring a million white nephews’, after Dr Johnny calls her Aunty). She’s also, most crucially, a staunch cultural woman. 

Eddie’s granddaughter, Winona is – like many of the staunch young Blak women I have the privilege of knowing – a dynamic character, animated by an emphatically Magandjin Murri piquancy. She bristles against Johnny instinctively, and her refusal to engage him draws him to her immediately (what can I say, I love bossy women too). But Lucashenko manages to render Winona in a way that makes her recognisable without reducing her to a cruel parody. When Johnny spots her outside the hospital setting for the first time, we too are swept up in the giddiness of his crush; as he beholds her, we too are dazzled by the gravitational pull of her commanding presence: 

Her personal style and aesthetic are detailed here in a picture of vibrancy and spunk. She has clearly been crafted in an image of Blak joy and love. Over the course of the novel, we get to know a young woman who can deftly re-weaponise the handwringing sanctimony of the ‘innocent’ settler-industrial complex with sass and deadly precision. In one scene, Winona pitches a GoFundMe campaign to ministerial advisors, telling them of Eddie’s status as ‘Queensland’s Oldest Homeless Elder’, playing on the fanfare of her VIP status in their opportunistic eyes as ‘Queensland’s Oldest Aboriginal’. Milking it for all its worth, Winona tells them her Gran has been ‘forced onto the streets at one hundred and three […] that yarn should raise a few bucks, ay? Pull a few heartstrings.’ For all her fire and passion, Winona remains focused on material outcomes, pushing to see action beyond the symbolic gesture. 

Lucashenko provides no glossary for the First Languages words in the novel, and nor are they italicised to indicate their ‘foreignness’. This is an immediate and explicit way that Lucashenko is interested in addressing the relational – by which I mean the dynamics created by an imposing colonial presence as well as the material conditions it creates that shape the realities of Indigenous people – while also investing trust in her readership’s intuitive capacity for comprehension. This refusal to demarcate the other-than-English is interesting and productive as a reminder that English – like foxes and cane toads, or Patterson’s curse and lantana – is an import to this continent.  

Despite the part of myself that doesn’t want to admit it, I did flip through to see if a glossary could be found, telling myself it was because I was taking my role as reviewer seriously and did not want any unnecessary ambiguity in interpretation. But as someone rigorously trained in the analytical method of close reading, I was humbled by Lucashenko’s insistence that meaning be made in this way, being forced to check the reliability of my (academic and elitist) comprehension skills at the door. Instead of relying on the concreteness of a direct translation, I had to surrender to intuitive methods to assemble meaning. But what does this say about relationality? Lucashenko exploits the stability of English comprehension in Australia, unsettling settler expectations through this seamless integration of First Languages. ‘I like to give my audiences credit for being smart and savvy people. And I always make sure that you can take an educated guess at what words mean from the context’, she has said. At the same time, she attends to a politics of accessibility, one where anyone with high school level literacy can, with a bit of effort invested on their part, pick up the book, read it, and enjoy it. If not ‘then I reckon I’ve failed.’ 

The use of untranslated First Languages is not the only way that Lucashenko plays with linguistic conventions, which also texture the relationship between characters. Take for example, Winona’s castigation of the white male yidaki player at the market, an encounter where linguistic coding brings both the latter’s character and Winona’s justice-oriented wrath to life. After the busker explains to Winona that he was born on Larrakia Country and was taught and given permission by Elders from Arnhem land to share their culture, he makes the mistake of telling her, ‘I don’t see how it’s your problem. Yidaki is men’s business!’ This is the final condescending straw. Winona empties the collection hat – an Akubra, for effect – into her bag and frisbees it into his face, before picking up the instrument for a final flourish of retribution and swinging it ‘like Babe Ruth on meth’: 

Beyond its delightful and accessible physical comedy, the scene presents a type of struggle that feels unique to the moment (in 2024 – the book’s temporal setting but also the year that I write this). The richly satirical details of Lucashenko’s characterisation – from ‘his blonde dreads splayed’ to his ‘cheesecloth-covered arse’ – offer a critique of the white hippy who assembles a mode of self-presentation in the manner of a pick-n-mix – with little-to-no impunity (until Winona arrives). At the same time, by wielding his idea of traditional male authority, he appeals to what he assumes are the protocols governing Winona’s obligations as a cultural woman, overlooking the fact of his own cultural trespass.  

But yidaki-playing is not simply a trope with which to beat up on the hippies of yore. Johnny, having heard the commotion from the other side of the markets, appears at the scene, marking the first time that he speaks with Winona outside of the hospital. Winona is surprised when Johnny takes the yidaki and begins to play – and pretty well at that: 

It’s then that Johnny discloses his Murri identity to Winona, explaining that his granddad – whose own birth mother was only discovered after his death – was stolen and raised by a Jewish couple in Sydney (hence his name, Newman). This revelation establishes the tensions that define the relational dynamic between the two for the remainder of the novel.  

When I was close to completing my Honours degree in 2017, I gave a mandatory presentation on my thesis project to the cohort, their supervisors, and the course convenor/coordinator. My project was on mobility and Aboriginal women’s writing. I loathe public speaking and so had prepared my presentation thoroughly. During the question time, I have a stark memory of being asked by the course convenor, ‘What about your subjective positioning as a white woman?’ I can’t remember the exact answer I gave, but I remember feeling like I’d been punched in the guts. I also remember not standing my ground and replying that I was actually writing from the perspective of a woman attending to her responsibility as an Aboriginal descendant.  

I was taken back to that 2017 university classroom when tracing Dr Johnny’s narrative arc. As he grows into his Aboriginal identity, he realises that though it’s not something that he wears on his skin (unlike Winona), he nevertheless desires to give some degree of embodied visibility to his reclamation of his Gomeroi identity. One way he does this is in shifting his register towards the vernacular, especially when he speaks with Winona. However, it’s an approach she resists: ‘[H]ey, hold up! Ya don’t get to be a blackfella just cos your ancestor was [...] If ya got no lived experience or living mob, then ya just another bloody white Aussie holding a vanilla milkshake, mate’. Though steadfast in the principles that shape her convictions, Winona is apprehensive about yielding to the possibility that the white-passing Dr Johnny may in fact be more than just ‘a white man with a Black ancestor’. She goes on to say to him:  

My chest tightens a little as I contemplate the existential predicament opened up by a cut so surgically precise it causes an inevitable bleed between the skin I live in and the outlines of my critical persona. Is the desire to fixate on a blood quantum – to measure a person’s sense of self via metrics, and to categorise accordingly – yet another incursion of coloniality? Well, yes, but how does this transpire in the messy entanglements of real life?   

Winona’s unyielding assertions here – a watershed moment at identity’s junction, similar to Johnny’s feeling creeping in that he ‘might never be Aboriginal enough for Winona’ – are all too familiar. Let me explain: on my dad’s side we are convicts, traceable to the First Fleet, and my mum is Yugoslavian (from a family of stateless postwar migrants) and Palawa/Pakana. When I talk about, or write about, being Aboriginal, it is inherently from a place that acknowledges the convergence of multiple histories in my body, their privileges and disadvantages. I look, for all intents and purposes, white, so why did the course convenor’s question get so stuck under my skin, remaining lodged there nearly seven years later? In addition to my skin tone, I also have my father’s last name, though my mother’s maiden name is one recognisable to members of the Tasmanian Aboriginal community. Clearly having been pressed on a tender spot, I wondered if I was stung by my vulnerability to the optics of racialisation. Does a fragile and strained connection to a First Nations community make me less connected to the bloodlines of my mother and to those that come through her father? What claim do I have, if any, to those bloodlines – or do I just stop being Aboriginal by virtue of the way I look, by my name? I have been asking myself these questions for over twenty years. 

Under the spell of Winona’s immense charisma, I feel utterly convinced by the logic she deploys against Johnny, even when it comes at the expense of rupturing my own sense of self. But then, like moving fingers inside of an origami fortune teller, the same message, albeit from a different perspective, is now visible inside the paper folds, and they take the form of the dismissive comments from my Honours course coordinator.  

As I followed Winona and Johnny’s tumultuous courtship, and the politics of its relational tensions as they both wrestled with their convictions about defining their Aboriginal identities, I was reminded of a storyline on the Aotearoan soap opera Shortland Street a couple of years ago. The character Desdemona Schmidt (played by the radiant comic Kura Forrester) is encouraged to learn te reo Maori, the tongue of her ancestors. Not raised in proximity to culture or language, Desi finds that her mouth can’t make the right shapes to land her syllables, and her linguistic struggle frustrates her to a point of deep shame. Does she, a visibly Maori woman, measure up to those who can speak in language? Are her blood ties otherwise negated? What is the difference between an ancestor hanging out in the family tree and a traceable family line? 

Lucashenko has stated that she intentionally placed the storyline of Mulanyin and Nita’s courtship one generation after first contact, a time when Magandjin had roughly equal numbers of settler-invaders and blackfellas. Resisting the pantomime nationalism centring the perspective of white people, Lucashenko’s vision captures a spectrum of delegates from colonial-era Magandjin – from the Chinese migrants looking to strike it rich panning for gold; to the spectral and violent native police; to displaced convicts; to working-class Scots; and, of course, to the local and transient First Nations peoples in and around the Kurilpa village. As a backdrop, the fledgling Magandjin’s rich diversity is seen through Mulanyin’s eyes as a baffling place with no regard for Country’s Law.  

The tenderness of Nita and Mulanyin’s courtship is a welcome respite from the gratuitous frontier violence often imposed upon readers in much Australian historical fiction. In one scene, Nita and Mulanyin sneak into the privacy of dusk shadows for a rare moment alone. With their fingers interlaced, Mulanyin attempts to negotiate a kiss by showing Nita, as promised, the biggest bingkin she has ever seen. While the claustrophobia and disorientation of settler society encroaches on them both, Nita’s life as the Petrie’s indentured servant has visibly worn her down. Mulanyin still has connection enough to culture and Country to allow him to envision their life together: 

As readers we know the outcome, the history has been written, but this does not diminish the poignant fragility of Mulanyin’s desires for his own future or of his romance with Nita, who seeks to shed the burden of her experiences. In the 2024 storyline, Winona bears the weight of not only the histories of Mulanyin and Nita, and her Goorie ancestors’ struggles, but also their visions of the future. And while her deep commitment to justice almost leads to disaster, the fundamentally Goorie utopia that she imagines through her gently blossoming romance with Johnny – just as Mulanyin did in his promises to Nita – shows love to be a collaborative project with implications for sovereignty beyond the couples.  

As opposed to the casting of a literal black-and-white binary so beloved in settler mythscaping, Lucashenko renders the Petries slippery, morally grey. I loved the careful construction of the pride that the Petries have in their progressivism – something like a Victorian-era version of being unironically ‘woke’. Just below the surface of their good and generous reputation lies an anxious moralism regarding the human cost of the privileges the family enjoys. In a remarkably loaded scene, Nita probes Mrs Petrie for details on black slavery and the imminent eruption of civil war in America. The cracks begin to show: 

The effortless moral hypocrisy of ostensibly ‘good Christians’ in the face of injustice is not left as subtext here. Lucashenko draws attention to the parallel race relations in Australia and America, and to the precarity of the power structures that service the Petries’ privileged standing in a colonial setting that necessitates Indigenous dispossession and subjection. It is a stark historical rendering of a ‘settler move to innocence’, wherein the abstractions (philosophical or theological) that uphold violent structures are incommensurable with their material realities. The desire to believe that war and slavery only occur on the ‘far side of the world’ are continuous with the desire to naturalise the settler on Aboriginal land; Mrs Petrie’s moral superiority regarding violence abroad blinds her to the violence so close to home it is barely visible to her. 

Through the rapport between Mulanyin and Tom Petrie, Lucashenko emphasises the specificity of the Petries’ moral attitudes and biases. As their friendship flourishes, the Yagara-initiated Tom acts as something of a cross-cultural interpreter for Mulanyin, who has not been exposed to white man’s ways prior to leaving his home in Yugumbeh. The sights of Magandjin are baffling to him, the behaviour of the settler-invaders disturbingly contradict the traditional Laws that bind the respectful and reciprocal conduct of his community. He asks Tom:

This amuses Mulanyin and his friends, who simply can’t comprehend the unyielding superimposition of ‘law’ so indiscriminately upon disparate places and peoples. Tom reflects on this to himself, as he witnesses their disbelief that if Englishmen had no recognised Dreamings – nothing to bind law and society to its reciprocal responsibilities to Country – ‘then England was pure savagery’.  

 Yet for all his diplomatic authority in Indigenous and colonial relations, he still occasionally reveals the extent to which he is a product of his settler upbringing. As part of his Yagara affiliations, he has been given by the leader Dalapai ‘pick of the country’ for his homestead – an unprecedented gesture – in the area called Murrumba. He travels with Dalapai’s son, Dalgnai, Mulanyin, and their friend Murree to the area so Dalgnai can show Tom the land. As Dalgnai gestures with a sweeping motion of his arm, Tom ‘fenced great swathes of the country lying before him in his mind, populating it with thousands of sheep and cattle’. Despite his embeddedness in Yaraga culture and Law, the trappings of European capitalism assure him that the country is his ‘fortune and his destiny’. Tom’s vision for the land is disrupted by the knowledge that it is already recognised by English law as Whiteside Station, occupied by a widow. Tom’s tense straddling of two worlds comes sharply into focus as he struggles to reconcile his induction into the cultural fold of his First Nations kinfolk with his colonial aspirations of land ownership and pastoral cultivation. In Lucashenko’s finely calibrated irony, what Tom might be experiencing here, albeit to a significantly lesser degree than the Yagara, is the spiritual and material dispossession that attends loss of title. 

Lucashenko has stated that Edenglassie was partially conceived in anticipation of the colonial fanfare around the Brisbane bicentenary – she wanted a book that put ‘an Aboriginal perspective on that whole event’. Tom Petrie’s story almost writes itself from a settler-invader perspective: put on a pedestal as the glorified ally, the bicultural idol through which so much anxiety is channelled, one able to ameliorate the discomforting realities of living on stolen land. And yet while Mulanyin is a purely fictional character, it is his arc and its closure that offer justice in a way that imagines our futures, as Aboriginal people. His narrative offers me comfort and a devoted urgency to the politics that empower us as First Nations people to put our histories back together as we write, rewrite, and reinvigorate ourselves in the face of severings and violent erasures.  

As a critic, I find these sovereign imaginings a wellspring of vitality. This collective project of envisaging Indigenous futurity is as crucial as the painstaking task of reaching into the past. Lucashenko undertook extensive groundwork for Edenglassie, reading old and forgotten colonial fiction, consulting with Yugumbeh and Yagara Elders on language and Law, and researching in the archive. There is power to remembering, and in the case of the novel, a literal re-membering. Despite the potential for traumatic encounters, such tender and fortifying work that reckons with, brings light to, and reappraises the past in this way enables survivance as a material reality.  

Despite the exercise of institutional power that asked me to attend to my putative ‘subjective positioning’, I still managed to find a weird place for the ongoing project of locating myself in a university setting. This hidden and rich world, a place from which my ancestry could be traced backwards from me, also revealed to me that the ‘convict pride’ environment I was raised in was not the uncontested rendering of history I had been led to believe it was. In hindsight, I find myself wondering at how fraught it is that a great deal of this strange journey of untangling was done inside academia. I feel self-conscious about the confidence I have when I articulate my sense of identity in such a specific setting – and a violent one at that – while out in the ‘real world’ I feel like a lone buoy floating on an ocean of self-doubt.  

Hélène Cixous describes the metaphorical – but also very corporeal – labour of writing as like the earth and the sea; both offer resistance, in the way that thought and language, the tools of writing, do. She goes on to say:

Perhaps, instead, it is an act of ‘[climbing] up toward the bottom’ in search of … well, the unknown. I imagine that this is the only way that reckoning and real change can begin to occur in so-called Australia. (Although the metaphor falls apart here because there are so many holes in the ground: mining, fracking, all on stolen land.)  

In my case, I admit that I do have a touch of the archive fever, and inside of it I harbour a secret and impossible hope that my ladder into the earth goes down deep enough to encounter the vital thread that can connect me to everything across time. In one of Edenglassie’s key scenes, Granny Eddie takes Winona to the place where she fell over the tree root jutting out from the earth, ‘the good Yagara earth’. When I look at the joints in my fingers, I see my nan’s hands emerging, her tired knuckles like tree roots on her delicate and slender, feminine hands. I bet you could count the stories in them like you could count the rings in a tree. I think what I am trying to say is – without giving away the ending – that it is all related, all entangled. It never actually had anything to do with me in the first place. The beginning and the end is in Country.