Goorie author Melissa Lucashenko wins $100,000 ARA Historical Novel Prize for her novel Edenglassie

Melissa Lucashenko didn’t want to write a book about First Contact.

“I didn’t think I had the specific Yagara [the First Peoples of south-east Queensland] knowledge to write what was going on before First Contact and at that exact point,” she told ABC RN’s Awaye!

Instead, the Goorie author wanted to write a novel set one generation later, “When the numbers of Blackfellas and colonists were about equal, when the tipping point was about to be reached and the colonists were about to outnumber mob for the first time”.

That novel is Edenglassie, which interweaves the stories of Aboriginal peoples living in Brisbane/Meanjin/Magandjin in the past and the present.

The novel starts in 2024, when Aunty Eddie falls in a Brisbane street, and follows her and her granddaughter Winona as she recovers in hospital. It then jumps back to the 1840s and 50s, to young lovers Mulanyin, a Yugambeh man who comes to Brisbane for ceremony, and Nita, a Ngugi woman who works for a white family.

Lucashenko tells ABC Arts the book is a “First Nations love story about how to try to live a good Aboriginal life as society is being transformed around you”.

That love story has now won the $100,000 ARA Historical Novel Prize from the Historical Novel Society Australasia, one of the richest literary prizes in Australia. It was praised by prize chair journalist Tony Maniaty as an “ambitious, epic” novel and “a fiercely original exploration of Australia’s past and its enduring consequences”.

The Historical Novel Prize also awards $30,000 to a book for younger readers. This year, the prize went to Beverley McWilliams for her “thought-provoking, enjoyable and uplifting” novel, Spies in the Sky, a book about a pigeon enlisted as a spy for Britain during World War II.

Earlier this week, Edenglassie also won the $50,000 Margaret and Colin Roderick Literary Award, from the Foundation of Australian Literary Studies at James Cook University in Townsville.

Edenglassie is unflinching in its depiction of the violent reality of colonisation and dispossession, including the botched hanging of resistance leader Dundalli. But, at the same time, the book centres the resilience of Aboriginal peoples.

Those themes make it a timely winner in the week of King Charles and Queen Camilla’s royal visit to Australia.

“I’m happy to supply the English monarch with a copy of the book,” Lucashenko says, with a laugh.

The two prizes this week are the latest in a string of accolades for Edenglassie: It won the top prize at the Queensland Literary Awards, the $30,000 Premier’s Award for a Work of State Significance, and the $25,000 Victorian Premier’s Literary Award for Fiction, and was longlisted for both the Stella Prize and Miles Franklin award.

Lucashenko hopes to use some of the $150,000 — before tax — she won this week to help get her brother into stable housing and to fund her next book, which will be a crime comedy.

“The prize money that I’ve won over the past several years has already helped an Aboriginal single mum in my extended family into her own home,” she says.

“This one will hopefully extend that project a bit more until King Charles decides to give it [the land] back anyway.”

Diving into history

Lucashenko was inspired to write Edenglassie in part to mark the bicentenary of John Oxley travelling up the Maiwar, or Brisbane River, to Magandjin.

“I wanted to have a book out there that said, ‘It’s been 200 years since Oxley sailed up the river, but what about the people that were already there, and what happened in the aftermath? Let’s talk about that,'” Lucashenko says.

But the author had been thinking about writing the novel for roughly 20 years, since she first read Tom Petrie’s Reminiscences of Early Queensland, as recorded by his daughter Constance.

Petrie is a central figure in Edenglassie — a white man who establishes a settlement in Queensland with the blessing of Traditional Owners, and the help of Mulanyin.

“I wanted to write about him and say it didn’t have to be the way it was. It could have been different. And the fact that it could have been different back then implies that it can be different now,” Lucashenko says.

But when Lucashenko approached Elders 20 years ago, they hinted she should wait to write the novel.

Lucashenko spent 2019 speaking to Elders, diving into historical archives and reading novels written and set during the early colonial period. At the same time, she had also moved to Brisbane and become more embedded in the community.

“I’m not a historian. I’m not trained in that discipline. I’m not pretending that this is anything that a historian would recognise as history but I’ve certainly done a hell of a lot of research and I’ve tried very hard to be true to the historical record, except when I’ve deliberately veered away from it,” she told ABC RN’s The Book Show.

In her research, Lucashenko found many untold stories, including some that had been wilfully concealed.

“I could have written a dozen Edenglassies,” she says. “It’s both a pleasure and a duty to uncover some of those deliberately hidden stories.”

But reading about colonial violence for months took a toll on the author.

“About nine to 10 months into the research, I realised it was actually getting to me,” she says.

Writing the book, that feeling dissipated.

“Narrative is very healing, and it’s healing both for the author and for the reader if you do it right,” Lucashenko says.

Bringing the book into the present

Lucashenko originally set out to write a novel set in the 1850s but soon decided it needed a contemporary thread.

“I realised that the trope of the ‘dying race’ would dog the book if I didn’t have the living, breathing Aboriginal characters existing in 2024,” she says.

Those characters are Winona, Aunty Eddie and her doctor, Johnny, who are also the source of much of the humour in the novel.

“I created Dr Johnny and Winona and Granny Eddie as a way to say that we’re still here, we’re not going anywhere. And modern Australia has a reckoning to do with us in the present day,” Lucashenko says.

And, as she told The Book Show, the humour in the novel was important, in portraying the characters as fully rounded: “It’s a pushback against the stereotype that we’re supposed to be miserable, we’re supposed to be drunken in the gutter, or in jail, or that we’re not supposed to have any agency or any fun. That’s not the Aboriginal people I know and am related to.”

Aunty Eddie opens the novel with a straight-talking streak, but mellows out while on pethidine in hospital. Winona meanwhile is a firebrand, who jokingly suggests Johnny, who moonlights as an environmental activist on the weekend, “burn Parliament House to the f**ken ground”.

Winona is based on some young Murri women Lucashenko knows — and has some similarities to her younger self.

“I still have days when I want to burn it all down,” she says, with a laugh. “I was definitely a Winona in my 20s and into my 30s, and then you settle down a bit.

“But when you see what’s not happening with carbon and climate change and the way coal and gas are still being embraced by the major parties, maybe we do have to start lighting a few matches.”

Both the modern and the historical characters find strength in Aboriginal culture and connection — as does Lucashenko.

“So now, everyone has to live with the consequences and we have to build back and make an Australia that actually works for everyone.”

Lucashenko hopes readers of Edenglassie come away from the book understanding the violence of colonialism “happened to people just like them”.

“Mulanyin and Nita had dreams and ambitions and fears and humour; had lives not dissimilar to their own lives,” she says. “So, the next time they read about a statistic of Aboriginal life or Aboriginal history, instead of thinking about a number, they might think about Mulanyin. They might think about Nita.”