Review: Edenglassie

Melissa Lucashenko, Edenglassie, (Oneworld Publications, 2025)

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/136335272-edenglassie

The worlds of Goories and whitefellas surround Granny Eddie’s hospital bed

Granny Eddie has a fall, knocked cold. Everything has ‘gorn skewiff’, whitefellas avoiding looking at an old Goorie woman. In the crisp hospital bed, she thinks of dirt, all her life being ‘a dirty Blak’. She feeds the journalist tall tales about the old days. Her granddaughter Winona is an angry woman. Dr Johnny is smitten.

1840. Dawalbin espies the Ancestors’ arrival, a ‘great white curve coming upriver’. The dagai (I guess, foreigners) are leaving; will the people now have peace? Mulanyin, a Yugambeh youth, catches a big mulloway, but has to return it since it’s a female bearing eggs. Soon he will be ready for the bora ceremony, and he dreams of owning his own whaleboat and marrying Nita, the Petries’ housemaid.

He and Murree compete in the regatta, only to find the prize for the blackfellas is less than for the whites. Young Tom Petrie, the first white child born in Brisbane, who ‘speaks Yagara like a Goorie’, catches a river turtle.

Meanwhile, the whitefellas in the government town struggle to ‘build a Christian civilisation in the wilderness’.

The story is based on the colonial history of Queensland. Edenglassie was a name briefly used for the penal colony near Brisbane.

The voices of Eddie and young Mulanyin are brilliant; one offering history, the other vitality. Young Tom’s familarity with the Goories allows us to see their world through sympathetic white eyes and see the whites’ world through their eyes—alien concepts like ‘Work, Fences, Debt and Jesus’.

A masterpiece, and a model of Showing not Telling. However, the unfamiliar vocabulary and culture obscured some of the major plot points. E.g. I didn’t understand the ‘statue disaster’. I could have used a Glossary.

At the end the stories of the modern-day and 19^th century Goories connect beautifully.

This review first appeared in Historical Novels Review.