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language: English
country: Australia
year: 2017
form: novel
genre(s): science fiction
dates read: 3.3.26-9.3.26
They tortured and enslaved, they seemed to have no limit to the cruelty they would use to keep their slaves under control. They stole children — that to him was the worst crime. Everybody was guilty, even those not directly involved, for they allowed it to happen, they absorbed the wealth that the system brought. The entire colony was culpable.
this declaration of collective culpability is, I would say, the heart of the Noongar writer Claire G. Coleman’s Terra Nullius. the book explores an all-too-historical dystopian Australia, occupied by the brutal Settlers, who regard the Natives as animals, suitable only for enslavement.
the novel follows a panorama of characters. first and foremost, there is Jacky, a Native who has escaped from the homestead where he was enslaved, traveling cross-country in search of the community he was taken from as a child and becoming something of a legend as he does. there is Rohan, the brutal Settler officer tasked with apprehending Jacky. there is Sister Bagra, the profoundly racist head of a mission school, trying to cover up her abuse and murder of Native children. there is Johnny Star, a Settler race traitor who has deserted from the colonial militia and allied himself with a group of Natives. there is the Church investigator sent to ascertain the truth of accusations made against Bagra. and there is Esperance, a woman who has lived most of her life in one of the last free Native communities, driven progressively further into the desert as they try to evade Settler patrols.
overall, I found the book extremely engaging: it’s gripping, and a page turner. but it’s also intense; I found I tended to want to put it down every chapter or to — not for lack of enjoyment but just because I needed a break.
the characters are vividly drawn. if Rohan and Bagra feel to some extent like caricatures, this is only because there have been far too many people like them in reality, as the history of settler-colonial education so devastatingly attests. the writing is simultaneously dreamy and matter-of-fact. there are a lot of comma splices (roughly every other sentence, I’d estimate) and occasionally a bit of repetition, but overall I enjoyed Coleman’s prose. each chapter is introduced by an excerpt from an in-world text (mostly but not exclusively from Settler perspectives) reflecting on The Native Question, and I think Coleman has done a good job varying the tone of these as well as using them to deepen her world-building.
it is difficult to say anything of substance about the book without spoiling The Twist, but given that it was shortlisted for multiple speculative fiction awards and is blurbed — in the Small Beer edition — by Kelly Link as “[a] gut punch of a book in the style of Le Guin, Atwood, and Butler”, you can probably guess that this is a work of science fiction. approximately halfway through the novel, it is revealed that the Settlers and Natives are not the British and Aboriginal Australians, respectively, but rather alien invaders and the few surviving humans, racial and cultural distinctions — and colonial histories — now obviated by the Settler conquest.
I don’t really think Atwood is an apt comparison, to be honest, and if we’re going to compare it to Le Guin we should be thinking about The Word for World Is Forest. Terra Nullius is, in many ways, a bleak book. as reality has taught us, settler colonialism is intractable: invasion is, as Patrick Wolfe put it, a structure, not an event, and structures involve everyone. you cannot simply kill the head of the Department of Native Protection, or the head of the mission school, and solve the problem: the entire colony is culpable.
but Coleman isn’t (just) assigning blame, either (and it should be noted that when she does it sometimes manifests as a frustration at Native inaction, even if the book is very conscious of the structural constraints on Native action). if Jacky’s flight moves the plot of the novel both figuratively and literally across the continent (or at least across what’s now Western Australia), Esperance and Johnny Star — and later the Church investigator — are the figures who give it its political thrust, each addressing a different audience. Esperance’s perspective speaks to Indigenous readers, raising pointed questions about political imaginaries, survival, and the necessity of struggle. Johnny’s, meanwhile, speaks to (lowercase-S) settler readers, asking us to reflect on our own involvement in colonialism and to take action, however small or inadequate, to disturb the structure that is settler-colonial dispossession:
Returning Jacky to his home, to his family, might not quite make up for all the evil Johnny had done, all the evil his people had done and were doing, but it would be better than nothing. He hoped it would be better than nothing.
what this — and for that matter the novel’s climax — points to is the limits of individual action. it might (might) be better than nothing, but it can never be enough. here I think the Church investigator, Grark, is pointed: Grark has traveled from the Settler homeworld, and he is horrified by the treatment of Natives, the violation of their personal and bodily autonomy (there is, for example, a human breeding program). Grark takes steps, in his capacity as representative of the Church, to address the violence he sees, but despite liberal fantasies, one person working alone cannot change the system — and the system may not take kindly to attempts to change it.
I do have some hesitations about Coleman’s handling of racial difference and colonial histories among humans, in that I think it’s a bit blasé. at the same time, I take her point that colonialism flattens colonized cultures, if the Natives here are analogous to Aboriginal Australians. if this is in some ways a reverse colonization story (what if the colonizer were colonized in turn), Coleman’s perspective as a queer Noongar woman gives it a markedly different feel than, say, John Marsden’s Tomorrow, When the War Began, though I’m having a harder time pinning down exactly what I think the difference is.
I’m really excited now to read Coleman’s other books — this is an extremely impressive first novel.
moods: dark, grimy, hopeful, polemic, reflective