Tree change: Melissa Lucashenko on ‘Mullumbimby’

Melissa Lucashenko’s novel Mullumbimby (UQP) is the story of one woman’s attempt to build a new life in country Australia. Reviewer Max Oliver describes it as ‘a modern tale of the clash between cultures, of the importance of belonging, and, surprisingly, of the pitfalls of making assumptions about other people and their background’. Read his review online here. He spoke to the author.

The gestation period of Mullumbimby was indeed long—60,000 years long, in a sense. But I lived with my family on Bundjalung land for a decade beginning in 2000, and I know and love the community of the northern Byron Shire very deeply. It’s where my kids were small, and it’s where I learned a lot of the saltwater culture that I embody. The novel was first conceived at a Buddhist meditation retreat just outside Byron Bay. I left the retreat early and drove in a kind of daze to Kingscliff, where I wrote the first 10,000 words in 24 hours. This was, clearly, a book demanding that I write it. The remainder was written part-time over the following four years, in Kingscliff and in Brisbane, after divorce forced me to return to Queensland. 

Horses are a passion, a weakness, an addiction and, alas, something of a pipe dream at the moment. I grew up with horses—galloping bareback and bridle-less through the bush was as normal to me as watching TV was for my peers.

It’s not a comic novel, but a novel with flashes of humour, I think—and some of the context of that humour will only be understood by Aboriginal readers. I’ve had white readers laugh too, though.

I would think ‘pragmatic’ would sum up Jo and DJ’s response to Uncle Humbug’s bashing, perhaps, more than ‘apathetic’. They are both angry about it—but in Jo’s case she has much bigger problems in the front of her mind. The reality is that blacks get bashed by cops all over Australia, and some black park-dwellers get bashed very frequently; if it happened in Mullumbimby nobody in the black community would be at all surprised. I do know personally of at least one similar incident of police brutality in Mullum in the past couple of years. You have to remember that the cop who was responsible for the appalling death of Cameron Doomadgee on Palm Island was not sacked—he is working as a cop on the Gold Coast. What does that tell us about justice?

Yes I do think Jo and Twoboy will live happily ever after, and they might even have kids together. Lots of Aboriginal couples do, contrary to what you might assume from the Aboriginal monsters you often see stereotyped in the mainstream media.

The last book I read and loved was Caribou Island by David Vann (Viking). David writes about familial relationships with devastating insight and considerable style. He has also mastered the knack of writing without a shred of sentimentality while making you care deeply about his characters. A writer I admire and intend to learn from.