Lucashenko’s eyes are wild with possibility. Something to do with Lucashenko’s family. A fortune teller is waiting outside, midway through a story. “Anyone have 10 ringgit I can borrow please?” There’s frantic urgency in her voice. One afternoon, she comes barrelling into the foyer where the other writers are gathered. There is an always-ease about her T-shirted person. I catch distant glimpses of Lucashenko sometimes: sightseeing in a rickshaw, chatting to an elderly street vendor. In between afternoon workshop sessions, we squirrel ourselves away to write in our hotel rooms, solo-wandering the stifling-humid Penang streets. Learn by watching and listening, use your mil and binung, was the centuries-old habit, and not by asking bloody silly questions all the time. The writer pauses briefly before each comment, as if double-checking whether it really needs to be delivered, weighing for gravity. Six months later, in Malaysia, at the long wooden table, in the lobby of Penang’s Ren I Tang hotel, it’s Lucashenko’s turn to give workshop feedback.

We stand in the hallway of The European, chuckling.

“When they told me your name,” she says, “I thought you’d be a whitefella.” Lucashenko’s earnest face cracks into a wide, welcoming grin. No frills and no fakery.Īt the celebratory dinner in Melbourne, we’re sat at opposite ends of the fancy table, but we eventually cross paths on the way to the bathroom. When we meet in person, she is immediately like her work: generous, considered, deep-thinking, exact. Several months later, I’m invited to attend my first international writers’ retreat, serendipitously along with Lucashenko. I immediately order two novels from her back catalogue, curious I haven’t come across her work before. Set in the midst of a native title war, among Bundjalung families, it is the kind of writing that kicks you square in the guts at the same time as lifting you up and over. The book, Lucashenko’s fifth novel, is devastating, funny, political. I meet her with the yarraman, and the magpies singing and mulanyin flying around and the fairy-wrens talking a mile a minute, bossing everybody around with their little chittering instructions. I first meet Melissa Lucashenko in 2013, on the pages of her award-winning novel Mullumbimby.

Mullumbimby by melissa lucashenko