In fiction she moves with ease.” You never get the sense that Lucashenko is making any of this up but using fiction to move with greater “ease” through the horrors of her own family history. The poet Tagore wrote that “truth in her dress finds facts too tight. Lest any readers assume this portrayal of Aboriginal lives is exaggerated, I would add that virtually every incidence of violence in these pages has occurred within my extended family at least once. Lucashenko told the Sydney Morning Herald that “the power of the powerless is to laugh really and to tell the truth … if you didn’t you’d be a mass murderer.” Yet it is telling that she still needs to stress this in the afterword of Too Much Lip: Lucashenko is always street-level with her subjects and characters. They let her into their lives because she is not writing from a loftier place.

It is what it is’.” Her Walkley-winning essay Sinking Below Sight: Down and Out in Brisbane and Logan tells the true story of a group of women who are resilient, generous and don’t see themselves as victims. Lucashenko’s is a rare and powerful voice a woman who has been both poor and rich many times, with a lived understanding about the fickleness of each state: “I drew on a lifelong study of Buddhism and I said to myself, ‘You’re poor again, so what? Suck it up. What they do is nothing compared to what has been done to them, of course. The characters you’re rooting for steal, bash each other up, damage property and animals and “illegally” trespass. Our protagonist wears a balaclava and raids the local council offices.

In Too Much Lip, a meat pie is a savoured luxury, and the height of generosity is when a policeman buys you two. Photograph: LaVonne Bobongie WallĪs for her inspirations, she cited Once Were Warriors and The Beverley Hillbillies, “a show that made a lot of sense to me when growing up.” This reminded me of the late Andrea Levy, the award-winning Jamaican-British author who said that she spent most of her childhood watching television in a council estate, and this formed her literary and cultural influences.

Book too much lip