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Nov 10, 2024 | 
theconversation.com | Jeanine Leane |Elizabeth C. Smyth
First Nations authored literature continues to excite and educate Australian readers. Non-Indigenous writers are grappling with how to craft inclusive fiction that does not impinge on Indigenous knowledge, beliefs and rights of self-representation. Inclusive fiction is central to a representative literary landscape. In settler colonies such as Australia, this comes with the danger of cultural appropriation.
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Jun 23, 2024 | 
liminalmag.com | Jeanine Leane
… Murumbidya bila is a story the geomorphology of this river is the story of my people the story of my people is the geomorphology of this river … a river is a family… streams entwine like lovers to arc and flow and meld together as one they weave and braid tributaries that spread like veins across land sky-water and earth-water deep in the throes of passionate embrace in the bed of county is the fresh-water love story that conceives a river my grandmother wanted to flow deep down into the...
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Mar 12, 2024 | 
hashtag.net.au | Penni Russon |Jeanine Leane
“From the moment I got here, I’ve wanted to set the whole of Brisbane on fire,” reflects Andrew, the protagonist of Melanie Saward’s debut novel. Saward, a Bigambul and Wakka Wakka author, moved to Bracken Ridge in the northern suburbs of Brisbane as a teenager, after growing up in Tasmania. So does Andrew, who like her, is Indigenous. When we meet him, he is in Year 10 and has recently moved to Bracken Ridge with his mother, Linda, and her boyfriend, Dave.
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Mar 12, 2024 | 
thetimes.com.au | Penni Russon |Jeanine Leane
“From the moment I got here, I’ve wanted to set the whole of Brisbane on fire,” reflects Andrew, the protagonist of Melanie Saward’s debut novel. Saward, a Bigambul and Wakka Wakka author, moved to Bracken Ridge in the northern suburbs of Brisbane as a teenager, after growing up in Tasmania. So does Andrew, who like her, is Indigenous. When we meet him, he is in Year 10 and has recently moved to Bracken Ridge with his mother, Linda, and her boyfriend, Dave.
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Feb 12, 2024 | 
inreview.com.au | Jeanine Leane |PHIL BROWN |Jane Ring Frank |Isabella Kelly
The experience of reading award-winning First Nations writer Jeanine Leane’s new collection of poems, Gawimarra: Gathering, is transformative. Born and raised on Wiradjuri Country at Gundagai, the Murrumbidgee River of Leane’s early life is the subject of many of the most memorable poems in the collection. It is also a metaphor for the bonds that gather her people to a place Leane describes as “the freshwater cradle of Australia”.
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Oct 30, 2023 | 
australianbookreview.com.au | Jeanine Leane
Fiction Melissa Lucashenko’s cyclic arcs Edenglassie University of Queensland Press, $32.99 pb, 306 pp Fiction Melissa Lucashenko’s cyclic arcs Edenglassie is the seventh novel by acclaimed Bunjalung novelist Melissa Lucashenko. Set in a brief historical window – a little-known interim of time and place after transportation of convicts had ended but before Queensland became an independent colony in 1859 – this narrative moves seamlessly between what whitefellas might call past, present, and...
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Sep 27, 2023 | 
australianbookreview.com.au | Jeanine Leane
Edenglassie is the seventh novel by acclaimed Bunjalung novelist Melissa Lucashenko. Set in a brief historical window – a little-known interim of time and place after transportation of convicts had ended but before Queensland became an independent colony in 1859 – this narrative moves seamlessly between what whitefellas might call past, present, and near future. In this interface, Lucashenko creates characters that cause the reader to not only ask – what if? but also where to now?
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Sep 14, 2023 | 
meanjin.com.au | Jeanine Leane
The bus turned off the Hume Highway and swung onto the Barton in the heat of the February day. Hazel stared out the window at the road that stretched before. She felt the change as the bus turned the corner, like a border had been crossed, and while the ground ahead appeared unmarked to the naked eye, Hazel felt the strangeness of being on foreign country. She stared ahead into the dry haze.
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Jun 4, 2023 | 
crikey.com.au | Jeanine Leane
I remember 1967, and being taken as a five-year-old by my grandmother and aunties to the polling booth at a little country school called Nangus Primary on the road to Gundagai. Nangus is a big floodplain where the Murrumbidgee widens out before it narrows, quickens and swings upstream. My grandmother was born on this floodplain and so was her grandmother, as well as my aunties and mother. I grew up on the floodplain too.
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Feb 6, 2023 | 
sydneyreviewofbooks.com | Jeanine Leane
In 1995 – just post Mabo, Noongar writer and scholar Aunty Rosemary Vandenberg delivered an excoriating address to the annual Association for the Studied of Australian Literature gathering (ASAL) gathering in Tandanya, Adelaide. The conference theme was ‘Rewriting the Mainstream’. Aunty Rosemary argued in an eloquent and passionate address that the mainstream/whitestream was in dire need of re-writing.
