Day 2: Mullumbimby
On the second day of Christmas, my literary love bought for me…
Melissa Lucashenko’s Mullumbimby!
Melissa Lucashenko’s Mullumbimby is a darkly funny novel of romantic love and cultural warfare from one of Australia’s most admired Indigenous voices. Told with humour and a sharp satirical eye, this is a modern novel set against an ancient land.
Is this your perfect Christmas gift?
The 2014 Stella Prize judges said of Mullumbimby:
This novel is a passionate, warm-hearted and accessible exploration of the Aboriginal relationship to country, a concept that many white Australians still don’t grasp. The political messages are clear, but they are never allowed to swamp the characters or pull the story out of shape; Lucashenko writes about Australia’s race-relations history with generosity and grace.
In focusing on a conflict between competing Aboriginal claims, Mullumbimby is doing important cultural work in quietly dismantling the notion, still pervasive in white Australia, that Aboriginal Australia is homogeneous in its beliefs and opinions, in its languages and in its identity. This kind of differentiation in literature and art among not only various Aboriginal groups but also among conflicting attitudes, politics, claims and beliefs is potentially taking Australia’s understanding of itself to another level.
Links and Media:
- Listen to Melissa discuss Mullumbimby on ABC Radio National.
- Read Eve Vincent’s review for the Sydney Review of Books here.
- Read an interview with Melissa for the Griffith REVIEW.
- Read an interview with Melissa for the Sydney Morning Herald.
Melissa’s recommendations: The best books by women she read in 2014
Too Afraid To Cry by Ali Cobby Eckerman, ‘for anyone who wants to understand Aboriginal resilience in the face of massive odds’.
