Nobody gets let off, neither Indigenous nor white characters. "It was by far the hardest book I have written." Lucashenko's father was European, her mother a Goorie woman of Bundjalung descent.īecause this is an authentic voice writing about what it means to be an Indigenous Australian in contemporary times, Lucashenko has taken on the tough issues that come with generational trauma – displacement, incarceration, abuse, racism, substance abuse, poverty, marginalisation. "I started drinking again in the course of writing this book," she admits. We have met for lunch in a pub in an outer suburb of Brisbane. She didn't have to look too far from home for these characters, and says "it is absolute joy to create characters, it really is, it is like nothing else". "In a kind of genius for judgment," she snorts. The mother, Pretty Mary, is loosely based on her own mother. Having six older brothers gave her ample opportunity to study this particular beast. "An alpha dickhead," says Lucashenko now. Kerry's brother Ken is on his third beer at 11am when she arrives. The Salter family exist in a state of hapless, comic dysfunction. Country and family have a way of wrapping themselves around you, even when they argue all the time. But she is in Bundjalung country, and there things are different. She is planning on paying the briefest of respects and then "f- off quick bloody smart over the border to Queensland". Kerry has returned home to a tiny country town in the Northern Rivers because her grandfather is dying. "But it wasn't a stranger, it was Kerry." Then she guns it, past locals astonished to see a "skinny blackfella" on "twenty thousand bucks of American heritage engineering". As the rider stops on the outskirts of town, crows flap around ominously – cue the spaghetti western music. The book opens with a stranger riding into town on a Harley, which may or may not have been stolen. Melissa Lucashenko's Too Much Lip gradually and explosively reveals painful secrets in a calamity-plagued Aboriginal family.
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