Melissa Lucashenko's fifth novel Mullumbimby (2013) is set in Bundjalungcountry in northern New South Wales and addressesthe crises of genealogical accreditation,traditional custodianship and social precedence thathave arisen in Aboriginal communities since thepassing of the Native Title Act in 1993.Lucashenko's novels are popular and conventional inform and engage the reader's empathy through acentral character, in this instance Jo Breen, alight-skinned Goorie woman, still hoping for arelationship with an Aboriginal man. She is the soleparent of a teenage girl, has an affinity withhorses and dogs, and has a personality informed byliterature. As the ethical centre of the novel, herinterests and subjectivity shape the narrative andstructure its resolution. An outsider in aBundjalung community, centred on the town ofMullumbimby in northern New South Wales, where rivalclaimants are getting ready to stake their claimsunder native title legislation, Jo has learned toprotectively disguise her intelligence. She swearsoften, and gratuitously, and every expression of herrefined sensibility is immediately neutralised withvulgarity: ‘She racked her memory till some lines ofWhitman bubbled up. […] Yeah, the old poofter geniuswas on her wavelength, alright’ (Lucashenko 2013,5). The lines of Whitman are never quoted, andinstead the reader is offered a language thatdegrades and cheapens thought and experience even asit protects Jo, its speaker, against idealism,disillusion and hurt.

Jo's anguish at her broken connection with herAboriginal forebears is palpable: ‘Cos you had to bea fucked up blackfella to know what it's like, notbeing able to prove who you are, or where youbelong. The agony of the stolen descendants’(Lucashenko 2013, 50). Unable to credentialise herBundjalung Aboriginality through settlerinstitutions, she satisfies her sense of belonging,and the need to belong, through commercial exchangeand the purchase of a property: ‘She had her twentyacres and her version of culture safely tucked inher back pocket’ and ‘She’d circled right around thehideous politics of colonial fallout, and boughtback the ancestral land herself ‘ (42).