Jo also has to come to terms with her new neighbours, including the farmer Rob Starr, who wears expensive boots and erects fences where none seem needed and Granny Narrung, an Aboriginal Elder who Jo initially dismisses for her old-fashioned and uptight Christian ways. This is practically a miracle as far as Jo is concerned. Twoboy, however, is dreadlocked, devastatingly handsome, heterosexual and apparently single. Jo is reluctant to get embroiled in what promises to be a messy fight. Twoboy and his brother are down from Brisbane to initiate a land claim which stirs up a hornet’s nest of conflicting interests in the area. Jo’s life is already complicated by her artistic and moody teenage daughter and becomes more so with the arrival in town of an outsider, Twoboy. She sees this as her own way of reclaiming Bundjalung country and the process of returning her land to health is deeply satisfying. The protagonist, Jo Breen, is an Aboriginal woman who uses her divorce settlement and the money she earns mowing grass at the Mullumbimby cemetery to buy a block of farmland. Mullumbimy is Melissa Lucashenko’s fifth novel and is, as the name suggests, set in northern New South Wales.
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