Claire G Coleman knew she needed to write a novel when she visited a memorial to a massacre on her family’s traditional lands.
Coleman, who identifies with the south coast Noongar people, had been travelling around Australia in a caravan for two-and-a-half years. “When I returned to country, I went to a museum in a small town where my grandfather was born,” she tells Guardian Australia. “There was an entire section of the museum dedicated to my family.”
She was invited to visit the memorial and the experience compelled her to write something that would grapple with this history: her own, her family’s and Australia’s. She wrote solidly for nine months – still in her caravan, still travelling – the novel that would become her debut, Terra Nullius.
Terra Nullius opens on what could be an alternate past Australia, or a distant future; a country that is both recognisable and indelibly transformed. After inhabiting the land for generations, the Natives (as they are called in the novel) are subjected to severe, brutal colonisation with the sudden arrival of the Settlers. Through shifting perspectives, Coleman tracks the lives of various characters from both groups.
Her own peripatetic lifestyle flowed into her writing: the book is grounded in natural landscapes, as the narrative passes through desert, bushland and rural townships, evoking the land’s open spaces and the ceaseless movement of its characters. Many of the Natives are nomadic by necessity: on the run from the perpetual threat of capture, death or slavery.
“I’ve deliberately taken an impressionistic view of landscapes and places, because I was feeling unsettled at the time and I wanted to make it unsettling for the reader as well,” Coleman says. “The feeling of travel, of not knowing where you are, of landscapes constantly changing. I think that disoriented sense of time and place was important, because a lot of Aboriginal people have felt very displaced and disjointed, and have a history of feeling like refugees in their own country.”
Following in the footsteps of writers such as Jane Harrison and Ali Cobby Eckermann, Coleman won a 2016 black&write! Indigenous Writing Fellowship, an initiative of the State Library of Queensland, for the first draft of the novel that would become Terra Nullius. Her prize included manuscript development with an emerging Indigenous editor and publication with Hachette Australia. The fellowship was the first time Coleman had submitted her writing anywhere and she describes winning it as “probably the most powerful vindication of what I was working on that I’ve ever had. I had wanted to write for years but never managed to get myself doing it.”
Terra Nullius fits under the broad umbrella of speculative fiction but describing its genre, plot or antecedents in greater detail is a delicate balancing act and risks revealing the nature of the twist that comes one-third through the novel. It’s a bold, profound revelation, one that changes the reader’s perception of everything that came before – and all that follows.
Coleman says that building this twist into the novel was one of its greatest challenges: “It’s hard, when you know the whole plot, to hold in your mind what the reader knows at that point. I sometimes spent hours at a time staring at the wall, trying to work out how to keep my secrets, how to write a scene without any reveals. One of the things I kept in mind while I was writing it was the twist at the end of The Sixth Sense – when it comes, it’s completely surprising, but you also realise it’s been foreshadowed all along. I was trying to foreshadow without foreshadowing.”
A lifelong science fiction reader, Coleman was influenced by HG Wells’ seminal sci-fi novel The War of the Worlds, in which aliens and humans clash following an extraterrestrial invasion of Earth. “I read that The War of the Worlds was inspired by a discussion that Wells had with someone, where he was trying to explain the situation of the Tasmanian Aboriginal people. The War of the Worlds and Terra Nullius are approaching the same question from opposite sides.”
Coleman is comfortable situating her novel in a lineage of First Nations writers using speculative fiction to engage with and subvert narratives of historical dispossession – alongside works such as Alexis Wright’s The Swan Book and Ellen van Neerven’s Heat and Light.
“Speculative fiction is one of the most powerful political tools in fiction,” she says. “It’s a genre in which there’s great scope for Aboriginal literature. A lot of speculative fiction is written with a firm eye on the past and to use speculative fiction is often to be able to sneak politics into places people don’t expect to see it. You can create a world that says what can’t otherwise be said and surprise readers by showing them that they understand something they didn’t think they understood.”
This political engagement is at the book’s heart, rooted in observations that underscore the impact of invasion and dispossession. One character observes of the broken spirits of many Natives and their decline into alcoholism and drug addiction: “The truth was, it was a sort of depression brought on by what they had lost, brought on by being dominated and controlled by another people. Who could not be depressed, being treated like animals in a land that had once been theirs alone.”
Observations such as this engage deeply with the real-life intergenerational trauma of Australia’s First Nations people. While this history is painful, Coleman found that writing about it through fiction was cathartic: “Terra Nullius came straight from inside my head, which means that every bit of emotion and politics and experience in it that is always there. I was able to vent all the pain. Aboriginal people live in a dystopia every day. The problem is that the world we live in, people don’t understand that.”
Coleman hopes to take that pain and use it reach a particular kind of reader. “While writing Terra Nullius, I had in my mind an idea of who would benefit from reading it,” she says. “The average Australian, who doesn’t necessarily understand the Aboriginal perspective on the invasion – or the colonisation as they would call it. People who don’t understand why we’re upset about it. The people who chuck a tizzy when we say we should change the date [of Australia Day]. The entire purpose of writing Terra Nullius was to provoke empathy in people who had none.”