Terra Nullius

Claire G. Coleman is an Indigenous Australian—she belongs to the Noongar people, who have lived on the southwest coast of the continent for thousands of years. Coleman’s first career was in the world of computers, working on web development and coding. But a visit to the places where her father and grandfather grew up changed her life. It made her realize that colonial violence wasn’t a distant thing, but rather a facet of the lives of her family and of Coleman herself. She wrote her first book, Terra Nullius, following this revelation. Since the novel’s publication in 2017, has dedicated her life to her art, to writing, and to educating people about the history of colonial violence and the deep history of Australia’s Aboriginal peoples. To date, she has published three novels—Terra Nullius; The Old Lie, which was published in 2019; and Enclave (2022). She has also published work of nonfiction exploring the truths of colonial history in Australia called Lies, Damned Lies: A Personal Investigation into the Impacts of Colonisation (published in 2023), as well as other essays, poems, and occasional pieces. She lives primarily in Melbourne.

Europeans first encountered the continent that is now called Australia in 1606, although it was more than a century later, in 1788, that the British established the first colony there, at Botany Bay. From the earliest years of the invasion, Indigenous people resisted, just as the humans do in Terra Nullius. Two notable figures in this history are Yagan and Jandamarra. Yagan was a Noongar man who lived at the turn of the 19th century. In 1831, he and his father led the first significant resistance against European invasion when they began attacking the Settlers who were occupying their ancestral lands. Yagan was killed by a White settler in 1833. Jandamarra was a Bunuba man born around 1873, who initially worked for the White settlers as a tracker. He became a guerrilla warrior after being tasked with arresting some of his tribesmen. During his career, which lasted about three years, Jandamarra developed an almost mythical reputation for his ability to evade capture. In the early 20th century, the Australian government stepped up its attempts to assimilate Aboriginal people into White society both by taking Indigenous and mixed-race children from their families and raising them in mission schools designed to indoctrinate them in European settler culture and through a eugenics program spearheaded by A. O. Neville. As Chief Protector of Aborigines and later as Commissioner of Native Affairs, Neville instituted programs that denied full-blooded Indigenous and mixed-race people the right to marry unless they married White people, with the aim of breeding out what he and other European settlers considered undesirable racial traits. 

H. G. Wells’s The War of the Worlds, published in 1898, tells the story of a failed invasion of Earth by Martians whose technological superiority gives them a distinct advantage over the human population in  much the same way that European colonizers’ superior weapons allowed them to conquer Indigenous peoples with relative ease. Wells reportedly took inspiration, in fact, from the European discovery and subsequent colonization of Tasmania. Claire Coleman has publicly situated Terra Nullius as a response to War of the Worlds, written from the perspective of displaced Indigenous populations rather than that of their White colonizers. Terra Nullius also draws on Jared Diamond’s 1997 bestseller Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies. This book disputed claims that the White European cultures that subjugated, colonized, and enslaved large parts of the world in the 16th, 17th, and 18th centuries did so because of intellectual, moral, or genetic superiority. Instead, Diamond argues, geographic and historical necessity encouraged Europeans to develop immunity to a wider range of infectious diseases and to innovate ever-more sophisticated weapons and that these quirks of history gave them an advantage over relatively isolated Indigenous societies. Finally, in its exploration of the inheritance of British colonialism, Terra Nullius joins a lengthy list of books written by Indigenous Australian authors, including Doris Pilkington’s 1996 Follow the Rabbit Proof Fence and Kim Scott’s 1999 Benang, both of which explore attempts to assimilate Aboriginal and mixed-race children to mainstream White society by selective marriage and mission school educations.