First Nations Telegraph

The Historical Novel Society Australasia (HNSA)announced the winners of the ARA Historical Novel Prize 2024. Offering the richest individual literary prize in Australasia, Melissa Lucashenko, an acclaimed Aboriginal Writer of Goorie and European heritage, was awarded the Adult Prize for her novel Edenglassie (University of Queensland Press).

 

Melissa Lucashenko’s Edenglassie is a fiercely original exploration of Australia’s past and its enduring consequences–an ambitious, epic novel that cracks what the author calls the ‘racist myth making’ that has painted Aboriginal people so negatively.

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The novel weaves together two powerful streams -19th century colonialism, and contemporary Indigenous existence in Australia. Lucashenko’s deft handling of these dual timelines illuminates the brutal realities of colonisation while celebrating the resilience of Indigenous cultures. While the novel is geographically specific, and wonderfully so, painting vivid images of South-East Queensland ‘then and now’, there’s a strong sense of the universal, showing the often-tragic impacts of displacement across history.

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Lucashenko’s deep research into the colonial history of Moreton Bay in the 1850s shines through, as does the deep love between the towering Mulanyin, arriving from the Nerang region, and Nita, an orphaned Moreton Bay woman who works for family of Tom Petrie, a man of integrity caught up in the culture war of his time.

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In the contemporary strand, Edenglassie sees the no-nonsense Eddie Blanket in a Brisbane hospital, attended by very feisty relative Winona; both become engaged in contemporary Brisbane life, one at a personal level and the other more politically, yet equally with enduring scepticism.

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Across the novel the characters' historical figures and those assembled into life by Lucashenko’s vivid imagination spring from the page with vitality and conviction. In both eras, concepts of tradition and idealism are confronted, often brutally, with rising tensions, violence and grief. The novel’s climactic ending is a powerful convergence of the narrative threads, offering an intensely moving revelation that leaves readers to reflect on the impact of history and the possibility of healing and renewal.

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Written with the wit, heart and intelligence that define Lucashenko’s work and virtuoso storytelling, Edenglassie is a timely work that enriches the landscape of historical fiction.

The judges for the 2024 ARA Historical Novel Prize, CYA category were Anna Ciddor(Chair), Danielle Clode and Lystra Rose. Anna Ciddor, chair of the CYA judging panel, says: “The judges had no trouble agreeing  the winning title, despite the tough competition.”