Melissa Lucashenko is an award-winning writer of novels including Steam Pigs, Mullumbimby and Hard Yards, and an essayist whose work regularly appears in Griffith REVIEW. She lives between Brisbane and the Bundjalung nation, and has been a board member of the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Arts Board of the Australia Council. In this interview she speaks about her piece ‘Sinking below sight‘, a report from outer-Brisbane’s impoverished ‘Black Belt’ and the stories of three women living with the day-to-day challenges of poverty, domestic violence and life on welfare.

 
How did you come to meet the women whose stories you tell in the piece?