Is this yet another tale of colonial bully boys wanting to destroy a sacred Aboriginal Eden? It’s more complicated than that. One thread of plot sounds familiar: big bad Jim Buckley, mayor of Durrongo, plans to bulldoze the Salters’ ancestral land on the river and build a jail, and the family is desperate to stop him. Somehow she pulls off this zanily incongruous mix of influences. Lucashenko has also said she had in mind Alan Duff’s novel Once Were Warriors (1990) and The Beverley Hillbillies television show (1964–71). I’m not surprised: it is consistently unflinching and makes no excuses for anyone, black or white. Lucashenko, born of a European father and a Goorie mother, has produced a string of fine novels (notably Mullumbimby, 2013) and essays, but she has said that Too Much Lip was the most difficult book to write. I’d have sighed and wept a bit throughout if it wasn’t so funny. That hapless crow is an apt portent for what Kerry encounters in Durrongo in the rest of Melissa Lucashenko’s splendid black comedy, where just about everybody bites and gets bitten in a cycle of ancestral woes and injustices, pointless violence, family dysfunction, and general stuff-ups. ‘The eaters and the eaten of Durrongo, having it out at the crossroads.’ Chances are it’ll starve to death, thinks Kerry. One bites a dead snake in the head and its fangs get wedged onto the bird’s beak, fastening it shut. The first conversation she has is in the Bundjalung language (translated for our benefit) with three cheeky crows. Except it’s not a stranger, it’s that skinny dark girl Kerry Salter, back to say goodbye to her Pop before he falls off the perch. A stranger rides into a one-horse town on a shiny new motorbike.
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