Jo energetically clears the introduced species, fences the grassland for her beloved colt, Comet, but a friend’s question, ‘Don’t you get lonely here on your own? ‘ rattles her. … doomed by the axes of men who – months or years from anything they thought of as home – had tried to slash and log and burn their way into freedom here.Īs the dugai cedar-getters and farmers cleared and fenced, the forests of white booyung and red cedar of the Big Scrub were replaced by grasslands, camphor laurel and lantana.

Jo’s developing relationship with her parcel of land is in one sense a salutary nod to the clearing, from the mid-19th century on, of the once dense lowland rainforest. That was something for a Goorie woman to think about something to hold onto and savour. … from where she stood in the middle of the big paddock, she could take off running in any direction and be winded before she’d left her own land. The significance of owning a small piece of jagan, her ancestral lands, is deeply felt: Jo Breen is a Goorie, an Indigenous woman from the north coast, whose job of edging a lawnmower around the graves of white settlers – both long and recently dead – at the local cemetery gives her the means to purchase a house and land a little out of town for herself and her unwilling teenage daughter. Melissa Lucashenko, in this sure, funny and quietly modulated novel, looks beyond the street sign to an Indigenous presence, broken but enduring. Like so much Australian geography, the Indigenous name has, flotsam-like, been retained while so much of the culture that gave it birth was swept away. Mullumbimby draws its name from the local Bundjalung language, meaning a place before a small hill. Melissa Lucashenko’s fifth novel, Mullumbimby, works at the guts of meaning: how we belong to each other and how we might belong to a place.įor most, the New South Wales far north coast means the narrow high-tide beach and tourist-hungry shops of Byron Bay, but 20 kilometres inland is the self-styled ‘Biggest Little Town in Australia’. Its fusing of memory, testimony and narrative is a selective one that shapes cadence and line out of life’s awkward arrhythmia.

This sure, funny novel of an Indigenous woman and her land is alive with the tensions of new ways of belonging. Tags: Australian fiction/ Australian women's fiction/ Indigenous fiction/ Mullumbimby

Mullumbimby by melissa lucashenko