Jo’s labours mix her sweat with the land, impressing on the reader the idea that the relationship of Aboriginal people to their country is resilient and adaptive. She breathes it in and sets to work on it, clearing mountains of rubbish, spraying camphors, ripping out fireweed and fixing fences of her own. Out at Tin Wagon Road, Jo treads barefoot upon her own country. She makes a living – just – by mowing the local cemetery, content to work for a wage tending the province of Mullum’s dead white souls, despite having once haboured creative ambitions. Having scraped together the money to buy a twenty acre block on Tin Wagon Road, she soon finds herself scraping stray gold coins off the floor of the car to buy milk. This realisation disturbs Jo Breen, the feisty Bundjalung protagonist of Melissa Lucashenko’s Mullumbimby. Fences and roads are the means by which the colonisers ‘bind the gift of a continent to themselves’ using bitumen, wire and timber. Lush paddocks rise and fall towards the coast, lined with boundaries and borders, numbered, named and claimed by whitefellas. The wholeness of the land has been dissolved, dismembered, and the properties lashed together again with fences. Topographic maps show the hills surrounding the northern New South Wales town of Mullumbimby separated into distinct, numbered parcels of land.
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