Celebrated Goorie author Melissa Lucashenko is giving away some of the prize money she has amassed across several awards for her seventh novel, Edenglassie.
On Wednesday night, she was awarded $40,000 for the Mark and Evette Moran Nib prize, adding to the extraordinary list of literary awards she has already collected for the novel, including the ARA Historical Novel Society Australasia’s adult novel prize ( $100,000), Margaret and Colin Roderick Literary award ($50,000), the Victorian Premier’s Literary award for fiction last year and the Queensland Premier’s award for a work of state significance this year.
“Every spare cent I have goes towards buying back land or housing,” she said on Wednesday night at the award ceremony at Bondi Pavilion Theatre.
“That’s been my main motivation for the three decades I’ve been writing – to get Aboriginal land back in Aboriginal hands.”
Speaking to the Guardian Australia, Lucashenko, 56, said that historically, she has distributed her literary prize money to those in need.
“I start with my immediate family and work outwards,” she said. “My kids are housed. My siblings will all be housed by the end of the year. I’ve helped a single parent with a house deposit from previous years’ prizes.”
She praised a Bundjalung elder who has passed as harbouring a good approach which she has adopted: “…You look after your family and then just do a bit more.”
“Part of all my prize money over the years has gone to people in desperate need, usually in my family, but not always,” she said. “You’re not much of a Blackfella if you have a roof over your head and food in the fridge and people close to you don’t. A central tenet of traditional culture is to share when you can.”
“I’m very, very grateful for the prizes,” she added. “We need to eat, and we need to buy the continent back!
“My mother’s favourite saying was, ‘if you want something done, do it yourself.’ So until such time as we’ve got treaty and our situation is changed through reparations, I’ve got to just keep ploughing every cent I can into housing and buying back land and providing resources.”
The Bundjalung writer, who won the Miles Franklin Award in 2019 for her novel, “Too Much Lip”, said on Wednesday night that her latest win “feels great.”
“Four years of hard yakka was worth it, and the book’s finding its readers, which is just as important as the prize money,” she said, adding that “What prizes do is bump your sales, which means that the book is going to be in more people’s hands and more classrooms…and the real story of Brisbane is going to be out there.”
“Every time I publish a book, I’m always really mindful of what blackfellas are going to say and whether the community’s going to be happy with me or not.”
The prize, now in its 23rd year, is presented by Waverley Council and awarded to a title which celebrates Australian research-based literature. Edenglassie is a work of historical fiction, based around Queensland’s colonial history, which Nib prize judges praised for its “prose [that] sparks with electricity.”
“The characters linger long in the reader’s mind. It is a book that expands understanding. It takes readers on a journey involving the heart, the mind and the eye.”
Throughout her illustrious writing career, Lucashenko has received numerous literary accolades, including a Walkley Award for Long Form Journalism, Victorian Premier’s Literary Award, ABIA, and Indie Book Award.
On her website, the novelist revealed that she is driven by her impulse to write “the best work I can.”
“All my books are true in the sense that they reflect one version of modern Aboriginal life. Readers must judge for themselves how much I might resemble my protagonists. But they almost always over-estimate that, I must say.”