![]() ![]() Her teenage daughter Ellen is supposed to be babysitting her young nephew Timbo while Jo does her mowing but, like a teenager, gets bored and “tags” Timbo with slogans such as “Better Conditions or I ring DOCS*” and “Pay me a living wage”. Jo is a single mum of indigenous heritage and during the course of the story is mowing the grounds of the cemetery in the small northeastern NSW town of Mullumbimby. ![]() It’s a short, short story, well suited, I suppose, to publication in a magazine like the Griffith Review. How could I go past it? I had to read it to see what it – and Lucashenko whom I was keen to read – was all about. It is a truth universally acknowledged, Jo decided, that a bored teenager with a permanent marker is a pain in the bloody neck. I was pottering around the web and came across this: You might be wondering why I chose her and this story? But it’s obvious really. She is an award-winning novelist and an essayist, but I hadn’t read her – until now. ![]() Time to rectify that a little, and why not with a short story by Melissa Lucashenko, an Australian writer of European and indigenous Australian heritage. ![]() I have reviewed many individual short stories by Americans (through the Library of America), but not by Australians. ![]()
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