Book Title: Edenglassie
Author: Melissa Lucashenko
Publisher: Oneworld Pubns Ltd
Number of Pages: 306
ISBN: 978-1836431060
Date Published: Jul. 21, 2025
Price: INR 388
Book Review
“Edenglassie,” by Melissa Lucashenko, is a strong, multi-layered tale that expertly weaves together history, present-day reality, and future possibilities. The story, set against the little-explored historical backdrop of Queensland between the end of convict transportation and its establishment as a colony in 1859, breaks down the borders of Western linear time. Lucashenko spans centuries with characters including centenarian Granny Eddie, her granddaughter Winona, and warriors Dalapai, Yerrin, Mulanyin, and Nita, demonstrating how colonial invasion continues to affect life while Aboriginal methods of knowing maintain resilience and connection.
Granny Eddie, the novel’s protagonist, falls outside the maritime museum and finds herself in a space where the past, present, and future all intersect. Her voice, disdainful of “white historians overflowing with moral rigour,” reclaims the authority of Goorie history, reminding us that truth and memory are embodied in Country and passed down through storytelling. Along with her, spectral and non-human presences—the visitor at her bedside and the matriarch fish—send signals of unfinished business, continuity, and renewal. This interplay between human and non-human actors broadens the narrative beyond Western rationalism, into a cosmology in which earth, water, and spirit play active roles in history.
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The book’s profound insistence on strength, love, and continuity, as well as its daring confrontation with the violence of indigenocide, are what make it so captivating. Mulanyin and Nita’s story from the 1840s and Winona and Johnny’s story from 2024 intertwine to demonstrate how Goorie wisdom and tenacity remain despite colonial dispossession’s attempts to eradicate culture. Unflinching in its truth-telling but radiant in its celebration of Aboriginal survival, storytelling, and an unbroken connection to Country, Lucashenko’s novel is both a challenge and a testament, written in prose that ripples like the river at the heart of its story.
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