At the same time she makes agonisingly clear the unhealed wounds of Australian culture, in writing that demands these wounds be addressed.

In her fictions and public life she makes visible the vibrancy and resilience of Aboriginal communities and their continued connection to land and culture. You remember that”, but like Kerry, Lucashenko refuses to be silenced. Kerry’s Pop says to her: “We livin’ in the whiteman’s world now. Lucashenko’s work is a powerful response to the entrenched racism that still shapes Australian culture to the public and official turning away from the brutalities and genocide on which this nation was built, or the violence and inequities that characterise contemporary society. Too Much Lip is a performance of truth told slant, the actuality of life and of embodied history wrapped within a work of fiction that comes alive in the characters and events that fill its pages thrumming with life.īut it is more than a story. This novel seems to respond to Emily Dickinson’s famous axiom about creative writing: Tell all the truth, but tell it slant. If you stick at it long enough you will eventually discover that you were writing truth where you thought you were writing fiction.” It will begin before the arrival of Europeans and address what happened at colonisation and what could have been done differently.In an interview about Too Much Lip, Lucashenko says: “I discovered that I was writing hidden history without being aware of how close to home I was. Melissa Lucashenko is an acclaimed Aboriginal writer of Goorie and European heritage. What she has in mind is a novel about first contact between the Indigenous people and colonists in Brisbane. Lucashenko says she was slightly thrown by winning the Miles for Too Much Lip because she feels that she is now ready to write her 'big book'. The subconscious knows, as Freud famously realised, so much more than we do.' 'I discovered I was writing far closer to home than I realised. When she was about 40,000 words in one of her brothers started talking about his traumas.

There were some strange moments during the writing of the book. Sometimes you do just have to sit there with the Gordian knot that is your brain and work and work in the darkness.' 'I’ve often thought that a book that was hard to write was the wrong book and I’ve discovered that I was wrong. Melissa Lucashenko's Miles Franklin-winning novel.įrom her years teaching karate Lucashenko learned 'at an almost molecular level' how to keep going with something.

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