(courtesy UQP)
Every nation has a story that it likes to tell about itself.
These stories serve to either bolster a nationalistic sense of identity, propagate an aggrandising myth of nationhood or portray history in a way that burnishes the country and its founders rather than detracts from it.
Australia is no different and quite likely its founding myths tick all three boxes, but the one that is most obvious when you read a novel like Edenglassie by Melissa Lucashenko (winner of the Miles Franklin Literary Award) is the lengths that the British Empire went to to pretend that it didn’t commit a slew of atrocities when it settled this country.
No matter how you slice it, and the national mythmakers have gone all out to self-servingly slice and dice like crazy, Australia’s history is a dark and terrible one, full of brutalist invasion, massacres, racial and cultural genocide and a grindingly cruel sense of false superiority that drove the British to treat this country’s people, who never ceded their land or sovereignty, as if they were lesser than when, of course, they were anything but.
It’s sorry harrowing and humbling tale, and Lucashenko, who writes beautiful prose with a necessary sting in its tail, lays it all out bare and unadorned in a story set in the mid-1800s at a time when Brisbane was founded and settlers were flooding in to an already well-occupied land whose people, the Goodie Federation, lived in harmony with each hand and the land the British soon ruthlessly exploited.
The pullen pullen was one thing while the sun shone, but when the moon rose that evening and fires blazed on the flat ground, the gathering was transformed. The night itself became alive, dancers shimmering out of the darkness like a shoal of whiting caught by sunlight in a cresting wave. Mulanyin saw men turn to flame, turn to sparks. He had never known his people could be — that they were — so very beautiful. The sights he saw that night filled him up. They made him feel holy.
While a number of key characters, many of them with an historical basis, feature in Edenglassie, its title drawn from an original name for the area, the one who stands out and who drives the final act of the engrossing narrative, which is split between 1850s Brisbane and its 2024 counterpart, is Mulanyin.
He is a young man at the time of settlement by the British, still able to fish from the sea he loves down in his people’s traditional lands on the Nerang River (now part of the modern Gold Coast) and who dreams of taking his bride back to his Yugambeh Country.
All too aware, as are so many of those who are gradually dispossessed in the Brisbane area – one of the greatest crimes is that the traditional custodians of the land have their Country taken from them only to be labelled “thieves” when they try to continue their customary way of life – of how the settlers are changing the landscape and their way of life, Melanin recognises that his only hope of a life that somewhat resembles that of his parents is to get a boat, fish for Dugong he can settle and otherwise stay out of everyone’s way.
It’s never going to be that simple, sadly but Mulanyin, who is still surrounded by some elders who think the British may yet depart of their own accord – this is in the early days and the Elders’ hopeful predictions are soon proved wrong – wants to believe his saltwater people can retain some measure of their old way of life even as it is blitzkrieged out of existence.
(courtesy UQP)
Two hundred years later, as Brisbane years up for its bicentenary at a time when many people though far from all are aware of the grim past that laid the foundations for what is now Queensland’s state capital, Indigenous activist Winona meets her grandmother’s doctor, Doctor Johnny Newman, a fateful meeting which sparks some romantic interest but more potently some sage and often intensely adversarial conversations about how the treatment of the saltwater people still well and truly echoes into the modern day.
As Brisbane’s modern establishment seeks to honour the city’s past while celebrating its present, firebrand Winona cannot stand by and let glossy PR and feel good stories of Australia’s mythologised past supplant what really happened to the traditional owners of Queensland generally, and Brisbane in particular.
She points out to Johnny that upwards of 100,000 Indigenous people were killed through systemic programs to exterminate them by the British who regarded people who had every right in the world to be there, and whose observance of customary Law and sustainable stewardship of Country made them far better equipped to look after the land that the invaders who kicked them out, as interlopers who had no place in a modern British civilisational outpost.
In ways that feel naturally organic to the story and never veer into clumsy sloganeering or expositional bludgeoning, Lucashensko lays out the grievously ruinous way in which a people who had existed for 65,000 years and whose culture the oldest continuous one in the world were cast aside and treated no better than vermin.
An odd sensation started up in Mulanyin’s gut, a whirlpool of anguish and confusion spinning just below his navel. An unravelling. He didn’t understand what was happening. Couldn’t grasp the meaning of what Billy Monday was saying.
As a white Australian well used to the sanitised and conscience assuaging view of our country’s history, Edenglassie is confronting, and wholly necessarily so, as you realise how much of this modern Western nation’s success is based on murder, violence, thievery and genocide.
And while we may view it all as history, for its traditional custodians like Winona and her feisty Granny Eddie who is a force of nature whose advanced age hasn’t dimmed the fire of her knowledge or perspective one bit, it’s real, living and now, something Lucashenko cleverly and rather movingly moves into the magically real final act when this truth is brought to the fore in the most inventive of ways.
Books like Edenglassie, which is rightly described as torching “Queensland’s colonial myths, while reimagining an Australian future”, not only tell a beautifully imagined and wholly engrossing and affecting story of two generations of Indigenous people connected by the same pain and dispossession, but remind us in powerfully intense and revelatory ways that the historical truth we know is not truth at all.
Written with real power and insight and a gift for binding hard truth into some deeply moving and intrinsically human storytelling, Edenglassie is one of the standout books of recent times, a story that needed to be told, has thankfully been told by a gifted and immersively empathetic writer (who a Goodie aka Aboriginal writer of Bundajalung and European heritage), and which if we are paying attention will pay a key role is helping us to see Australia’s history as it is, and not as mythmakers would like us to view it.