In recent years, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander writers have claimed some of Australia's most prestigious literary prizes, including the Miles Franklin, the Stella Prize and the Prime Minister's Literary Awards.
Some of these winners — including Alexis Wright, Melissa Lucashenko and Tara June Winch — appear alongside poets, activists and debut authors in our wrap of First Nations writing featuring reviews by The Bookshelf's Kate Evans, The Book Show's Claire Nichols and Sarah L'Estrange, and critics Declan Fry and Cher Tan.
The result is an impressive shortlist that reflects the rich tradition of Indigenous storytelling found in Australia.
Praiseworthy by Alexis Wright
Giramondo
A cataclysm of uncertain origin engulfs Praiseworthy, a small town that seems to lie in northern Australia but which may exist in another Australia (or world) entirely. Wright has great fun playing with Praiseworthy's exact location, not only in space but in time: references to COVID and social media mingle with histories drawn from the Howard-era NT Intervention and elsewhere.
The book is galvanised by its unforgettable central family: quixotic patriarch Cause Steel, rounding up donkeys to kickstart an economic revolution; his wife, Dance, searching for her familial roots in China; Aboriginal Sovereignty, their tragic son; and younger sibling Tommyhawk, an indelible addition to literature's gallery of fallen angels (think Milton's Satan and Goethe's Faust).
Praiseworthy's lush, compulsive panorama recalls the fabulism of Carlos Fuentes, Guillermo Cabrera Infante and Hungarian writer László Krasznahorkai, each of whom are discernible in the choral hum of Wright's prose. Yet Praiseworthy's music could belong to no one else but Wright, singing the accumulated histories of our continent.
— Declan Fry
Edenglassie by Melissa Lucashenko
UQP
An elderly Aboriginal woman falls over at Brisbane's South Bank in 2024 — the year of the city's bicentenary. As Eddie Blanket touches this "good Yagara earth", time stills for a moment, then circles, so that ancient stories and modern indignities and recent ancestors all come together, ready to talk and laugh and rage and love.
And because it's Miles Franklin Award-winning Goorie writer Melissa Lucashenko taking us into this complex moment, there's humour as well as toughness, a distinct voice with dry asides layering up the banks and valleys and swamps and expanding landscape of Brisbane, once briefly called Edenglassie.
Granny Eddie, the woman who fell but will not lay down and give up for anyone, has a wonderfully stroppy granddaughter and her own stories to tell — but it's her ancestors who are the heart of the book, taking us to the 1840s and 50s.
This is colonial Queensland, told from an entirely Goorie perspective. It's not defined by the Sufferers (the convicts) or the white "settlers", but by intersecting nations and movements up and down the coast, a story of gatherings and feasts and diplomatic relationships amongst a federation of people.
Mulanyin, one of those ancestors, is a handsome young saltwater man, who we see coming into adulthood and his own skills, driven by honour and law, negotiating a changing world meeting a woman who knocks him off his feet.
But he also sees and hears shocking things, including the roar of the crowd as the resistance fighter and real historical figure Dundalli is executed. Mulanyin is deeply embedded in his own ancient stories and systems but, as the world around him shifts, he has to fight to hold onto his name.
Lucashenko's novel is about survival, among other things.
There are ghosts, whispering histories, insisting you pay attention to them; but insisting, too, that we recognise those with flesh and bone and stories to whom time is also tethered, all those people in the present.
— Kate Evans
This review was first published in October 2023.
Women and Children by Tony Birch
UQP
Tony Birch's writing is as tender as a bruise. The White Girl, Dark as Last Night, Common People, Shadowboxing — and many more — are stories of working-class lives, Aboriginal stories, inner-city kids, survivors. They are stories of warmth and love and beauty, as well as violence and pain.
In his latest, Women and Children, we meet Joe Cluny and his family. It's 1965 and Joe is 11 years old, in that sweet in-between stage of life — with a kid's interest and logic, but an adult awareness hovering nearby.
He's a bit of a dreamer, with trouble "in his back pocket", according to the nuns at least. These nuns, though, are cruel, in that everyday offhand way that can make life a misery: "There's a hundred ways to get on the wrong side of the nuns. They're as mad as cut snakes, every one of them, even the quiet ones," he's warned.
Joe lives with his mum Marion — tough, loving, resilient — and his smart and spiky sister, Ruby. His grandfather Charlie lives close by, in a house full of stories and objects collected from his career as a council street sweeper, shining a light on coloured glass bottles and the possibilities embedded in old paperbacks. Charlie's friend — Ranji, scrap metal merchant and also an old man storyteller — is another marvellous character.
This, then, is Joe's world: defined for us by class and Catholicism, but with distinct hints that there are Aboriginal stories, stolen children and injustice in the broader context too — hinted at rather than spelled out.
There is also violence. When Joe's Auntie Oona turns up, bruised and bloody, Joe has to work out what it means to witness and respond, while the women in the family administer to her body with both tenderness and fury.
We too, are bruised, tenderised and hopeful.
— Kate Evans
This review was first published in November 2023.
Firelight by John Morrissey
Text
This debut collection of short fiction from John Morrissey offers a sly, teasing narrative voice, elegantly staged dialogue and an eye for the absurdities and indignities of contemporary life.
At times recalling Will Self — both authors share a droll narrative voice, interest in office space and alternative timelines, fabulist narrative and colonisation — there are a number of highlights throughout the collection.
Autoc, a tale of future "alien" contact, invites the reader into all manner of sinister magic: the atmosphere of the 19th-century macabre, the question of imperialism, and an unnerving dreamlike atmosphere reminiscent of the lecture hall scene in Dario Argento's Inferno. Five Minutes is a beautifully executed metafiction examining familial angst, bureaucracy and the probable outcomes of a giant centipede attack. Ivy mixes urban ennui with slacker wit, gradually transforming into a meditation on rapture.
Much of the wonder of these stories lies in their suggestiveness. Morrissey is capable of relating the bizarre with lucidity and a calmly sardonic touch. The narratives are elusive yet vividly realised, leaving their endings and implications to the reader's imagination.
They could be described as speculative fiction but, in truth, they are more firmly anchored to that genre's underlying fabric: ourselves, and our inescapable strangeness.
— Declan Fry
This review was first published in December 2023.
Harvest Lingo by Lionel Fogarty
Giramondo
Harvest Lingo is the 14th collection from poet, Indigenous rights activist and Murri man Lionel Fogarty.
Fogarty is a combative writer. Part of me wants to say something like, "Fogarty's fights are many" – words that, with their jaunty assonance, feel very Fogarty-esque. His poetics extend deep into questions of language and the nature of writing, expanding and challenging the conventions of English.
His scabrous, associative drawl, his syntax — yearning and weary, staunch and disdainful, disbelieving and heart-in-hand — is written in honour (or spite) of the "brief flaring moment".
This is poetry framed not in "one sort of personal fireworks voice" (to use an expression from his poem Intruder Wants the Writer) but with an awareness of how, as he says, "stories are seemly to world words".
There's both a kind of warning and a fatigue in the plaintive — and deeply moving — poem A First Note About the Regions:
I opened the door that
Morning to the horror of society
Sis we got to pay another 250
To get our brother's coffin to the church
We already given all we got
Tender and pugilistic, this is language that goes hard — not because it is strained but because it will not settle for second-hand thinking or second-hand feeling. It is restless. It wants to mark you.
Sometimes the lines seem driven by the kinetic forces of internal rhyme, as in this jangly couplet from Yo I Am the Man: "What gave the name rights man right to rewrite history / by giving change to the land names?"
Such moments recall the work of Murri songwriter Kev Carmody, whose Needles in the Nursery shares the frenetic energy of Fogarty's poetry. (Carmody's 1995 song The Young Dancer is Dead was written in memory of Fogarty's brother.)
"A poet moves people, changes society, not white man laws," Fogarty writes in his poem The Poor are Well Organised Than the Up-Class. "Till those who can not write will write their own way."
His work remains stubborn and unflagging: "Fist high small even big name poets / Logan City will never know."
— Declan Fry
This review was first published in June 2022.
Close to the Subject by Daniel Browning
Magabala Books
Spanning from 2007 to the present, Close to the Subject by Bundjalung and Kullilli man Daniel Browning (and host of RN's The Art Show) is a tapestry of sovereign resistance.
Published by long-running Indigenous independent press Magabala Books, Browning's collection of non-fiction writing is a compelling record of First Nations agitprop, an assembly of artists and activists who have long fought the status quo in unconventional and perceptive ways.
Even though it largely comprises previously published art criticism and radio journalism, the through-lines are clear. Browning has been preoccupied with what he calls an "autonomous criticality" for a long time now, wondering, as he notes in a 2021 critical essay, "if we are being 'proppa' (truthful or ethical, according to the 'proper way' of behaving)".
It's difficult to pinpoint singular pieces in such a cohesive collection: Browning speaks to academics, as well as relatives of historical figures such as blues singer Georgia Lee and political activist Anthony Martin Fernando. He also conducts scintillating conversations with artists Vernon Ah Kee and Archie Roach, amongst others. This approach foregrounds an Indigenous understanding of time that Browning gestures to in an essay on public memory: "The past is contemporaneous, it exists today and will abide into the future."
Browning's interviewing style is a convivial one, which refuses to acknowledge "objectivity" — the white journalistic fallacy. As a result, there's a sense of mutual trust in the interviews.
Radio transcripts, while usually awkward to read on the page, have an experimental quality as they dip in and out of archives, commentary and citations. Browning's art criticism is sharp and the selection also serves to highlight writing published in more obscure forms, like the catalogue essay.
Throughout the book we encounter some unpublished poetry, memoir and a screenplay. While these inclusions may seem jarring in another collection, here it demonstrates the depth of Browning's preoccupations; the pursuit of self-determination as one that is interlinked with others'. White establishment genre conventions be damned.
— Cher Tan
This review was first published in September 2023.
Dropbear by Evelyn Araluen
UQP
Dropbear, which won the 2022 Stella Prize, is the debut poetry collection by Evelyn Araluen, an award-winning writer and co-editor of Overland literary journal.
While it is playful and satirical in tone (with titles like THE LAST BUSH BALLAD and Appendix Australis), it is also deeply serious in its interrogation and deconstruction of Australian colonial mythology.
Araluen layers imagery and literary references; in the poem Dropbear Poetics, for example, the creation story of Tiddalik sits alongside a reference to May Gibbs's Snugglepot.
Elsewhere she draws on Dorothy Wall's Blinky Bill and the works of DH Lawrence, Banjo Patterson and Kenneth Slessor, among others. (At the end of the book, she provides a helpful explanation of the literary references that appear.)
Gibbs's seemingly innocent gumnut babies are cast in a new light in the poem Mrs Kookaburra Addresses the Natives, in which Araluen directly incorporates the author's words to highlight the demeaning way Indigenous peoples are referred to in her famous Snugglepot and Cuddlepie series.
In her acknowledgements, Araluen writes: "Many lives and stories have been erased, exploited or violated in the short but haunted history of Australian literature." This collection is an electrifying literary recalibration.
— Sarah L'Estrange
This review was first published in the April 2022.
The Yield by Tara June Winch
Penguin
At first glance, the plot of The Yield, which won the 2020 Miles Franklin Literary Award, sounds very similar to the previous year's winner, Melissa Lukashenko's Too Much Lip: an Aboriginal woman returns home to the family property for her grandfather's funeral and discovers that ancestral land is under threat. But that's where the similarities end.
While Too Much Lip was funny and fierce, The Yield is something else altogether — a lyrical and moving work that manages to balance fine storytelling with a bold mission to document and celebrate Aboriginal language.
We learn that August's beloved grandfather, Poppy Albert, was writing a dictionary of Wiradjuri words before he died. His dictionary is woven through the text, and as Albert explores the meaning of words, we get a sense of the man himself — his upbringing on a former mission, his outlook on life, and the mystery of August's sister, who went missing when the girls were young.
The Yield is an ambitious and important book, but it's also totally readable. You'll be swept up in August's story and her loving, imperfect family as they fight to protect the former mission they call home.
— Claire Nichols
This review was first published in July 2020.
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