The books I have selected are all connected to Meanjin—the location, not the literary journal. This is familiar territory for me: I grew up slightly north of Meanjin/Brisbane, on the stolen lands of the Kabi Kabi people in the hinterland of the area now known as the Sunshine Coast. It was an overwhelmingly white community in which a brown child with an ‘unusual’ name stood out like a sore thumb. ‘Greek? Italian? A little bit of Aboriginal?’ one of the town worthies asked.
I was not even the littlest bit Aboriginal, but I sensed my ‘outsider’ status was somehow connected to the dispossession of the traditional custodians of the land that we settlers now inhabited as though by divine right. We were taught what were described as Aboriginal ‘myths’ about local geographical landmarks—the Maroochy River, Mount Tibrogargan, Mudjimba Island (then known as Old Woman Island). But these stories were presented as fairytales, not literature and certainly not history. For history, we were told settler narratives about Tom Petrie, Eliza Fraser, the gold rush, and why it had been a bad idea to introduce the cane toad to try and control the beetles that were destroying the sugar cane crops. None of which explained who ‘we’ were, why I was not really one of ‘us’, or why ‘they’—the Kabi Kabi people—were spoken of in the past tense despite still being clearly very present, albeit heavily outnumbered.
I scoured the local library in search of more satisfactory narratives, but this was the 1980s and most of the books that I was seeking were still decades from publication. There were notable exceptions, of course. I soaked up the poetry of Oodgeroo Noonuccal, revelled in David Malouf’s novels, never really forgave Thea Astley for the sad fate of Vinny Lalor, who at fourteen years old was the same age as me when I read about her in A Descant for Gossips, and whose hometown of Pomona (or Gungee, as it is called in the novel) was just half an hour farther north of my own. But for the most part, I had to wait until middle age for the books that I needed to read as a teenager. Here are three that have helped me to better understand my ‘first place’.
A First Place
David Malouf (Vintage Australia, 2014)
A First Place, published in 2014, is an anthology of Malouf’s essays to celebrate his 80th birthday. The earliest piece in this collection was first published in 1984—a time when Joh Bjelke-Petersen was still premier of Queensland and I was still in high school. Even the most recent, first published in 2010, was written several prime ministers and a global pandemic ago. But all of them achieve the quality of timelessness, in large part because they are so strongly grounded in Malouf’s sense of place.
Malouf’s novels take the reader to sites ranging from the Western Front during World War I in Fly Away Peter, to the unnamed Italian town in which a young man plots an assassination in Child’s Play, to the fringes of the Roman Empire in An Imaginary Life. However, to my mind the best of Malouf’s books are those like Johnno, Harland’s Half Acre and his memoir 12 Edmondstone Street, which are partially or entirely set in Brisbane, where he was born and raised.
I have selected A First Place mostly on the basis of its titular essay, in which Malouf discusses how Brisbane has shaped the worldview of writers like him. The city’s hilly topography provokes not contemplation but ‘drama and a kind of intellectual play, a delight in new and shifting views, and this is because each new vista as it presents itself here is so intensely colourful’.
While this basic topography remains unchanged, Brisbane is no longer the overgrown country town it was during Malouf’s childhood in the 1930s and ’40s— and mine in the 1970s and ’80s, for that matter. The city’s population has become substantially more diverse in recent years, although Malouf’s own family background (Lebanese Christian on his father’s side, Portuguese Jewish on his mother’s) remains ‘exotic’ in Brisbane, and in Australia more broadly. Booming population growth and soaring real estate prices have put traditional Queenslander houses out of reach for most middle-income families, as housing shifts towards townhouses and apartment blocks that are cooled by air conditioning rather than by shady verandas and open doors. But the old-school Queenslander houses (‘like elaborate cubby houses, great grown-up treehouses hanging precariously above ground’) retain a stubborn grip on Brisbane’s sense of what a house ought to look like, their dominance reinforced by their role as the Heeler family home in the ABC’s hit animation series Bluey. Other facets of Malouf’s first place remain unchanged—the subtropical skies that are ‘to more sombre eyes, almost vulgarly picturesque’, the way the river acts as a ‘disorienting factor’ by meandering through the suburbs (unlike the Thames or the Seine or the Arno, which divide their cities, ‘north and south’). And while Brisbane gardens may have shrunk, they remain a zone in which ‘nature is a force that can’t easily be domesticated—everything grows too fast, too tall, it quickly gets out of control’.
The book’s opening essay, ‘A Traveller’s Tale’, reflects on the process of leaving home.
Malouf describes this as ‘one of the oldest stories that we tell’, saying that it appears in three different versions. The first is the story of folk heroes like Odysseus who have adventures, undergo ordeals and get lost for a time, but who are destined to return home. The second is the story of the Wanderer, the Flying Dutchman who is ‘doomed to perpetual movement and exile’. The third is the story of heroes like Aeneas (and like Malouf’s grandparents, although he does not state this), who find a new home on a distant shore. The story of Aeneas is ‘a story of hardship and loss, but the end is open and therefore hopeful’. Malouf concludes that in Australia, ‘we are all voyagers of this sort, settlers, in having experienced in our bones (that is, in the lives of our father and grandfathers, parents and grandparents) the painful business of leaving a first place and remaking ourselves in a new one’.
Except of course that ‘we’ are not all settlers. Malouf is far from oblivious to Australia’s history of invasion and colonisation, which he discusses in essays on Robert Hughes’s book The Fatal Shore, the 1988 bicentenary and the 1999 republic referendum. But Malouf’s imagined ‘we’ is always assumed to be settler (and male, unless otherwise stated, but that is a different issue). His descriptions of south-east Queensland resonate deeply with me, but the answers to my questions about my first place lay in the writing of its First Peoples.
Edenglassie
Melissa Lucashenko (UQP, 2023)
In Melissa Lucashenko’s introductory note to Edenglassie, her most recent multi-award-winning novel, she explains that the title was the colonial name briefly used for what is now the inner-Brisbane suburb of Newstead. She chose it for her novel ‘in a nod to paths not taken’—paths that need not have led to dispossession and genocide.
Edenglassie tells two different but interconnected stories set centuries apart. In 2024 (a date that lay in the near-future as Lucashenko was writing this book), Goorie Elder and grandmother Eddie Blanket is knocked unconscious after falling and hitting her head on the pavement outside the Maritime Museum on Brisbane’s South Bank. The story of her recovery in hospital and the budding romance between her granddaughter Winona and doctor Johnny Newman are interspersed with scenes from the 1850s. These centre on the story of Mulanyin, a Yugambeh kippa (young man) as he learns to hunt and fish, marries his beloved Nita, and negotiates working arrangements with prominent settler and initiated man Tom Petrie. Mulanyin gradually realises his country stands at a critical turning point. The abolition of the Moreton Bay Penal Colony in 1843 had opened up the region to free settlement, and the colonisers were now poised to outnumber the colonised. The Frontier Wars, which had already taken a brutal toll in the colony of New South Wales, were now set to devastate his own country as well.
The two storylines converge at the end of the novel as Eddie Blanket is discharged from hospital to a celebrity reception for ‘Queensland’s Oldest Aboriginal’, Winona and Dr Johnny plot to avenge a historic injustice, and the city celebrates the bicentenary of John Oxley’s expedition along the Brisbane River (or the Warrar, as the novel’s Yuggera characters refer to it).
Lucashenko does not claim that her Bundjalung identity licenses her to tell First Nations stories however she chooses. She outlines the meticulous research underpinning Edenglassie and the permission she obtained from Yuggera Elders to deploy their language and cultural references. Just as Mulanyin learns that the food he harvested was gifted to him thanks to decisions made by the Ancestors generations ago, and that his decisions would determine the bounty available to his future descendants, Lucashenko is respectful about the stories she ‘harvests’ from the historical records. And while she does not flinch from depicting the brutality of settler-colonialism, she does not resort to trauma porn either. Lucashenko is acutely aware of Eddie Blanket’s decree that ‘stories have the power to hurt as well as heal’. We feel the magnitude of dispossession, massacres and poisoned flour more deeply for seeing them via the impact on the survivors rather than as a literary snuff-movie.
And, of course, stories also have the power to entertain. Despite its tragic subject matter, Edenglassie is at times a very funny novel. Its female characters in particular are scathingly witty at the expense of their menfolk, their colonial oppressors and the do-gooders whose attempts to salve their consciences bestow little or no benefit upon anyone except the do-gooders themselves.
As would be expected, Edenglassie evocatively describes the location from which it takes its title. The river in particular plays an important role, mediating the connection between the novel’s two timeframes. Like Malouf, Lucashenko notes its meandering nature, ‘snaking around the City Botanic Gardens with the Story Bridge in the distance’, while the crowd at the West End market is ‘trapped in the tight Kurilpa loop of the river which, having embraced you, was mighty slow to let you go’. Other key events take place at Suncorp Stadium, built over the site of the former Milton Cemetery. Lucashenko paints a landscape richly populated by Ancestors, non-human animals and plants. Some of these non-human characters—a fish, a fig tree—play crucial roles in the narrative.
Both Eddie Blanket and Mulanyin could be cast as Odysseus according to Malouf’s storytelling typography. After all, their stories fit the template of ‘the folk hero [who] sets out, has adventures, answers riddles, undergoes tests and gets lost for a time, but in the end reaches home’. But after reading this novel, I find myself wanting to read more writers for whom the story of Dundalli (the Aboriginal warrior whose execution features in Edenglassie) is their point of reference instead of (or at least as well as) that of Agamemnon.
Personal Score: Sport, Culture, Identity
Ellen van Neerven (UQP, 2023)
‘I have a score to settle,’ Ellen van Neerven declares in the introduction (or ‘pregame’) to their galvanising memoir. Van Neerven’s love of football is a running theme and metaphor throughout Personal Score, but the book is at least as much about culture and identity as it is about sport. A seductive blend of memoir, poetry, history and manifesto, Personal Score asks the reader to consider: ‘What does it mean to play sport on First Nations land?’
On stolen land, in other words. The book will provoke even those of us who have abstained from sport since leaving high school to ask ourselves what it means to live, work, love, grieve and celebrate on First Nations land—land that van Neerven makes clear is saturated with First Nations blood.
Like my previous two selections, Personal Score stands out for its strong sense of place. There are evocative descriptions of a childhood trip to Mackay for the state championships, of travelling with their father to his home country of the Netherlands, of a trip to France with their mother to attend the women’s World Cup, and of their experience of life in Naarm/Melbourne. However, Personal Score is centred around van Neerven’s coming-of-age in Meanjin.
At eleven years old, van Neerven told their parents ‘I want to play’. This proclamation came despite the fact they had been assigned female at birth and there were no girls’ teams in their area. Their football-loving father eventually managed to find a team that would accept them and signed up to be their first coach. Football quickly became the centre of their life, a source of pride and belonging.
But football was not always a friendly space for van Neerven as a young person of Mununjali Yugambeh and Dutch heritage. They experienced racism and homophobia, as well as sneering attempts to ‘gender police’ a body that was regarded as too masculine for the girls’ team, too feminine for the boys’. As they reflect in a series of poems, sport has long been the site of contestations over race and gender in Australia.
But as van Neerven tells us, sport on this continent long precedes white settlement. ‘As First Nations people from Australia are the oldest surviving culture in the world, we are also the oldest living sporting culture and the oldest sportspeople in the world … Sport, for us, is umbilical to the land.’ Non-Indigenous sport, on the other hand, ‘sees the environment as part of the conquering’. And killing Aboriginal peoples was ‘sport’ for many of the European invaders.
Personal Score overlaps with Edenglassie in many regards, drawing on several of the same historical sources and describing the same landscapes. Like Edenglassie, Personal Score offers insights into another way of being—one in which ‘only two relationships matter: relationship with land and relationship with people’. And both Edenglassie and Personal Score chronicle the destruction that settler-colonialism has wreaked upon the land, as well as the crucial role of First Nations knowledge in attaining climate justice and healing country.
Van Neerven warns that Personal Score ‘is an ugly book that was born of the ugly language I grew up hearing in this country’. But it is also a book that describes great joy—joy in the possession of a new pair of football boots, in kicking a goal, in family, in sex, in art, in the connection to land and country and in what van Neerven describes as ‘Blak belief … an act of defiance, as colonisation has given us many reasons to doubt ourselves; the settler state does not believe in us’.
Van Neerven tells their readers, ‘First Nations writing is Country. If you want to understand the country you’re on, read the words of its writers. Find out what happened here. And don’t forget it.’
I am grateful to them for providing settler-colonial readers with the opportunity to do exactly that.
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Malouf’s meditation on his first place led him to wonder whether there was ‘a Brisbane way of experiencing things’. He speculates that growing up in the city may produce ‘something in the style of mind of these writers, even in their use of language—a restlessness, a delight in variety and colour and baroque effects … that we might trace back to the topography of the place’.
Those are certainly characteristics of all the books I have considered here. And I would endorse Malouf’s conclusion that, given the nation’s wide variety of landscapes and history, ‘Australia is not one place’.
But neither, I would add, is Meanjin. My admiration for Malouf’s writing remains undiluted, but to see the city through the lens of Melissa Lucashenko’s and Ellen van Neerven’s writing is to see it with the familiar settler-colonial palimpsest removed.
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Shakira Hussein is a writer and researcher based at the University of Melbourne. She grew up on the stolen land of the Kabi Kabi people in so-called south-east Queensland and now lives on unceded Wurundjeri land.
