Melissa Lucashenko > Quotes

“Into the river that was about to be stolen away again, as it always had been since Captain James Nunne Esq. first rode up with his troopers, one two three, crying I’ll have that, and that, oh, and that too, while I’m at it.”
― Melissa Lucashenko, Too Much Lip

“Respect is a fulltime job, twenty-four seven. The way to behave in the world so that nobody’s pride gets trampled, so that anger doesn’t get a chance to ripen into disaster.”
― Melissa Lucashenko, Mullumbimby

“Her native church was built right here of rock and sand and feather and bark and moss.”
― Melissa Lucashenko, Too Much Lip

“With that thought, the boy had the electric realisation that all his life he had been eating the decisions of his Ancestors. Every fish, every mudcrab, every ugari or turtle or vegetable or egg or fruit, they all came to him — to all his people — from generations of nurture. None of it was accidental, or random. And if his Old People hadn't cherished the biggest fish and the female turtles, if they hadn't sung up the Country, and protected the fecund of every species since the dawn of time, then he would not have eaten the results from the fire that night. Just as his children and grandchildren still unborn had needed him to release today's Matriarch. The thought consumed him with wonder; it made him feel small, yet at the same time as though he belonged in a universe of meaning; part of a web of ceaseless and sacred connection across thousands of generations.”
― Melissa Lucashenko, Edenglassie

“It seemed there had been a lot of hard men in Pop's life. Hard men with stone hearts, bent on turning the country into their own clenched fists.”
― Melissa Lucashenko, Too Much Lip

“Granny Ava was the link: the last heathen of the family to speak the lingo fluently, before the Church waltzed in and jammed the Lord's Prayer in Granny Ruth's twelve-year-old mouth instead.”
― Melissa Lucashenko, Too Much Lip

“That talga been sung there forever and always,’ Granny Nurrung went on. ‘Protection for the water, see. Then, Captain Cook time. Our old people seen the dugai come in, seen the way they were. Greedy. Breaking their own law, the ten commandments of the Lord God himself. Went too wild, shooting us mob. Chopping jali jali, killing the rivers. Stealing the jahjams away. Our old people saw the dugai couldn’t be stopped, and they knew what they had to do. Our mob mighta started wearing trousers, and working for the white man, yeah, but first they made sure they left their talga in a safe place where no dugai could ever take it away.”
― Melissa Lucashenko, Mullumbimby

“Listen to country, girl, it’s been here a damn sight longer than you have.”
― Melissa Lucashenko, Mullumbimby

“And since when did going to jail make somebody a villain, for Christ's sake? But that was dugai logic for ya. Steal a million acres and you're a pioneer hero with a brass statue in the council chambers, but pinch a car or a mobile phone and you're some kind of fucking monster.”
― Melissa Lucashenko, Too Much Lip

“How all Aboriginal landscapes and peoples and sentient beings were connected across the continent, tied to each other in a thousand ways by names and totems and songs and dances and stories. How everyone somehow belonged to everyone else, before colonisation. Nothing alone, nothing ever in isolation, but always as part of a larger whole extending out to the air and the stars and the planets.”
― Melissa Lucashenko, Edenglassie