Author | Melissa Lucashenko |
---|---|
Language | English |
Genre | Novel |
Published | 1997 ( University of Queensland Press) |
Publication place | Australia |
Media type | Print ( hardback) |
Pages | 245 |
ISBN | 978-0-702-22935-0 |
OCLC | 1088063432 |
Steam Pigs is the 1997 debut novel by Melissa Lucashenko. It concerns Sue Wilson, a young Murri woman, who explores her Indigenous identity while living in Brisbane.
A review in The Australian Journal of Indigenous Education wrote that "Steam Pigs takes us into the world of today's " untermensch" ...", [1] and that it "..is a woman's book set in a very particular place and at a very particular time; but it confronts themes that are eternal and universal.". [1] A Lesbians on the Loose review called it "...as unsentimental as it is empathetic.". [2]
Steam Pigs has also been reviewed by the Journal of the Association for the Study of Australian Literature, [3] Social Alternatives, [4] Australian Literary Studies, [5] Queensland Review, [6] and Ilha do Desterro. [7]
An excerpt appears in the Macquarie PEN Anthology of Australian Literature. [8]
Although Lucashenko presents the treatment of Indigenous Australians by non-Indigenous Australians in a rather negative manner, she also candidly addresses problems within the Indigenous community, ... In Steam Pigs, Lucashenko explicitly depicts suburbia as co-occupying Indigenous land; she is the first Australian novelist to do so and thus her novel is radical on that count alone.