"Mullumbimby" is a (justifiably) uncompromising novel that uses language as a weapon.
Lucashenko certainly captures this slippery process without being judgmental. More often than not this tends to re-enforce a pecking order. I have noticed that a lot of subconscious decision making is legitimized in the sharing of these twilight zone moments, and if discussed by the group, there is the sense a of collectively manufacturing a shared dreaming. There wouldn't be a week in my office when there was not a conversation involving eerie (retrospective) predictions and apparitions (often accompanied by willy wagtails and dead pets). If you are not familiar with the culture, it might seem this book is laying it on a bit thick - but it's spot on. She also beautifully illustrates the deeply spiritual (and more than a little superstitious) connection Aboriginal people have to their land. She shows the underbelly of Native Title war - I've seen this face to face and it's nasty ugly. Melissa Lucashenko has written a wonderful account of what it feels like to be an indigenous woman living in the Northern Rivers area. One of my ancestors, or more precisely the younger brother of my great-great-great-grandmother is mentioned by name in this book. They solved the "problem" of Aborigines camping on their newly acquired farmsteads by giving the tribes sacks of poisoned flour. When I finally tracked down my birth mother, one of the many things I learned about my ancestors was that they were the first white people to settle in the "Northern Rivers" area.
I am adopted, and a couple of years ago I set out to discover my "roots". And I also have a darker connection with the actual places and real peoples this book is about. The people I know are from tribal groups a little further south than those depicted in "Mullumbimby" but I can tell the dialogue is tape recorder accurate in both language and the (sometimes banal) topics of conversation (a lot more on "language" later). I have worked in the Indigenous health and Family support sector for over a decade so I know first hand just how accurate the depictions of life are in this book.
I have a lot of personal baggage I bring to reading this so my rating for the book says more about me than the book's considerable merit. Sometimes the closer you are to something, the larger the differences seem. "Mullumbimby" is certainly a cleverly written authentic account of contemporary indigenous life and I really wanted to like it more. I found this one of the most challenging books I have read in a long while.
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