Too Much Lip
by Melissa Lucashenko
A Murri woman comes home to save her family's land from a prison.
For you if
you want to understand contemporary Aboriginal Australian life through a novel that refuses to make its characters victims
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Kerry Salter is a Murri woman who returns to her family's land on the banks of the Clarence River in Queensland — the land her family has occupied for generations and that a developer now wants to turn into a prison. Lucashenko writes with a dark comedy that is entirely Aboriginal — the family's dysfunction, their love for each other, their relationship with the river, the specific humor that survives dispossession. Won the Miles Franklin Award. The funniest and angriest Australian novel on this shelf and the one that most completely refuses the poverty narrative that white Australia imposes on Aboriginal stories.
Where This Book Lives
- Setting
- Australia
- Voice
- Written by a Australia author
Related Viewing
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dir. Stephen S. Campanelli
Hockey couldn't save him from what came before.
Torn from his Ojibway family and committed to a Catholic residential school in 1950s Ontario, Saul Indian Horse survives institutional abuse and finds an unlikely refuge in hockey — though the game can't undo what the school did. Adapted from Richard Wagamese's novel.
Why it’s here: Punk in refusing to let athletic triumph erase institutional abuse — Saul's hockey talent doesn't heal the residential school system that tried to break him. Pedagogical in showing how trauma and skill can coexist in the same body without cancelling each other out.
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Why it’s here: Punk in its total refusal to look away from what colonization and urban poverty did to this family, without pretending it stands in for all Māori experience. Pedagogical in showing cultural reconnection, not therapy alone, as the path back from cyclical violence.
Same pattern, different era
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