Lucashenko’s title is a portmanteau of Edinburgh and Glasgow,and was the name given to the penal colony that became Brisbane.Edenglassie opens in 2024,whenan ageing Aboriginal woman,Eddie,takes a fall and lands herself in hospital. Sceptical of the medical profession,given the history of her mistreatment by authorities,Lucashenko tells us,“she had been concerned with dirt all her life,and with being dispossessed of the same,not to mention treated like dirt,which is to say,trampled over and disregarded as a general rule”.
While in hospital,she is attended-to by Doctor Johnny,who has recently learned via DNA testing of his Indigenous ancestry,but Eddie’s granddaughter,the plain-speaking Winona,is quick to scuttle any idea that he can identify as Indigenous,without a thorough cultural education. Winona is something of a firebrand for Indigenous rights;in one particularly amusing incident,Winona confiscates the didgeridoo of a busking white man and wields it as a weapon against him.
In a second narrative strand set in the mid-1800s,we learn about Mulanyin,who belongs “to the five Yugembeh rivers which fell like wide blue ribbons from the western range”. Travelling with his law-brother Murree,Mulanyin encounters Nita. Nita was “rescued” from slavery by the Petrie family,working as a maid,but ultimately taken on as the family’s ward (though she continues to provide their domestic labour.)
The love affair between Nita and Mulanyin,as well as the depiction of kinship,shows the intimate ties these characters have to the land,defining not only their culture but notions of selfhood. In one scene,Mulanyin attempts to fish a female mulloway,but is directed by his elders to return it to the sea. Mulanyin then has “the electric realisation that all his life he had been eating the decisions of his ancestors”.
Edenglassie shows etiquette and respect as central to the Indigenous way of life,belying prevailing colonial attitudes. Mulanyin observes that a young Yugambeh boy was “quite rude not to stop and yarn”.
In 2024,Eddie encounters a presence in her hospital room,masterfully named by Lucashenko as “the Voice”. The omniscient narrator inEdenglassie serves Lucashenko particularly well,hovering between characters,enacting with nuance a variety of Indigenous perspectives:the moderate Eddie,who is more ready to reconcile herself to a peaceful solution,and Winona,who is understandably angry on behalf of her people.