A sadist, genocidal colonial administrator – known only as the Devil. A wide-eyed investigator from the Settler motherland. A murderous and inhumane Settler nun, managing the mission, who resents and tortures the young Natives in her care, and their land. A Settler Trooper, for the first time seeing the – uh – humanity in the groups of Natives he massacres. A forlorn and bedraggled camp of Native refugees fleeing crisis after crisis, ever thinner for it. Actually, without Coleman’s author’s note clarifying that all documents in this archive are fiction, I would have believed that some of them were drawn from the historical record.Ĭoleman cuts quickly between familiar scenes in the novel’s opening chapters. She has fictionalised an archive that never seems contrived, forced or tedious. A rich, incisive and old race politic bleeds through them. Some of the most potent and unsettling of these false historical documents are letters home, Settler policies, anthropological appeals to preserve a subject population. Large-scale chaos, is, after all what we have come to expect of the apocalypse in contemporary vision – and yet at once it is a far cry from the systematic order of colonisation. Less startling is the shared history to which each fragmented article contributes. Each text is a fiction, unexpectedly, crafted by Coleman. Each chapter opens with a snippet from some archival or historic text. For a long while, then, Terra Nullius is decentralised.Ĭoleman’s somehow-unified pastiche colonial worldbuilding is compelling. We don’t stay with him for long, not even for three pages, before Coleman introduces a flutter of new characters and worlds, all contained within the Australian continent.
Jacky is a lingering figure who sweeps a set of catastrophic narrative arcs together, as if by happenstance, as he seeks to find his roots and his home – evading those trackers, Troopers, local militia and native police that seek his extermination. We begin with Jacky, a young Native man (and slave, stolen from his parents at a young age) fleeing a mission run by a callous benevolent nun into an unforgiving landscape. This program doesn’t so much unearth new Indigenous literary voices as equip them to produce the full, unrelenting, unapologetic extent of their work. She and Terra Nullius are alumni of the State Library of Queensland’s blak&write! program, which aims to secure and promote fresh and unique Indigenous literary talent. No speculation required.Ĭoleman is a skilled writer. Terra Nullius is a work of speculative fiction written by Claire Coleman, a Noongar woman whose people have seen – and survived – the apocalyptic moment for hundreds of years. It’s colonisation, this continent, time, place, Country, race – but not quite as we know it. Terra Nullius is terra nullius, but not as we know it.
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