The longing with which she writes, the hymn to a beloved country comes from five years of writing in the near-exile of suburban Brisbane after a divorce. Lucashenko spent most of the decade from 2000 on the coast and deep in the hinterland raising children and horses. Part of life's long journey into adulthood and, eventually, elderhood for Aboriginal people is to be mindful and to be observant of both people and of all sentient beings.''Īnd the displaced homesickness for tribal land is not just a generational malaise. ''There were people from far northern NSW and the Gold Coast kidnapped into the native police … And a group of boys actually walked back from about Rockhampton or even further north hiding all the way to get back to their home country.''īut the acute observation of the natural world is not just a writer calculatedly taking notes. Lucashenko's great-grandmother, Christina, was taken from the Tweed at the age of eight to be a ''servant-slave'' in Queensland. The morning felt miraculous … It seemed to her as if the day - this morning, this sun upon these hills - called for a kind of reverence that she could barely express.'' White wisps lingered among the dark knotty pines beside it. She writes: ''The bottom dam was hazy with mist. ''For people who practise Aboriginal lore there is very little distinction between the land and self.'' It is a ''blueprint'', embedded in the psyche written on the body. Someone knows she is there and someone is welcoming her, but not everything is understood and not everything is to be understood.'' This is about the mystery at the heart of things. ''It is hard not to take these things as signs sometimes. ''I have been that close to a wedge-tail, they are a spectacular bird,'' she says. Her fifth novel, Mullumbimby, is imbued with a visceral, animistic feeling for the land, what is on it and what passes over it.įairy wrens ''had a lot to say about intruders so close to their bottlebrush tree'', ibis ''mutter to each other'', and a circling wedge-tailed eagle could be the deceased aunt of her protagonist, Jo. White people see Rotary parks and headlands, we see sacred sites.'' We see the world that white people see but we are also seeing a mythic landscape at the same time and an historic landscape.

She sees symbols and signs, birds bringing messages, hears ancient voices on the wind.

Mullumbimby by melissa lucashenko