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Chapter 2
Themes
and Colors
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Terra Nullius, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Human Nature
Colonial Violence
Freedom and Bondage
Homeland
Hope
Summary
Analysis
The head of the Department for the Protection of Natives—known to the Indigenous people under his supervision, his staff, and even his wife as “Devil”—sits in his office feeling totally overwhelmed. He—and his desk—are scrupulously tidy, but the walls of the room are so covered in letters, notices, newspaper articles, wanted posters, and photographs that there’s not an inch of plaster left to be seen. Every day Devil reviews requests: requests for increased rations in Indigenous communities, requests for news of the children taken from their families, and requests from Indigenous couples for permission to marry. Devil carefully considers each one before scrawling “denied” across it. Sometimes he thinks he should just get a stamp, but he takes his job seriously. He wants people to know that a person answered their request with nothing but their best interests in mind.
The book makes it very clear who the villains in this story are by naming this character “Devil.” In part, the book bases him on A. O. Neville, a 20th-century British citizen and Australian colonial government bureaucrat who was first the Chief Protector of Aborigines and later the Commissioner of Native Affairs in early 20th-century Australia. The book thus uses Devil to typify the kinds of abuses that settler colonialists imposed on Indigenous people generally, but especially in Australia, where the government forced Aboriginal people to live in squalid conditions which they then used as justification for taking away Aboriginal children and forcing Aboriginal people to assimilate into colonial society and work for colonists. Devil typifies a mentality that sees Indigenous people as so inferior that anything done to them can be justified in the name of bringing them into line with Settler society.
Active
Themes
Just as Devil fears he will lose his mind from boredom and the intolerable heat of the Australian summer, something novel surfaces from the endless litany of requests: a postcard from Doctor Des Asper, thanking Devil for doing the difficult but altruistic work of bettering Indigenous people by assimilating them and thus making them useful to society. Grateful that someone finally appreciates his efforts, Devil tacks the card up among the other papers on the wall.
The letter from Dr. Des Asper echoes the way Devil thinks of his job. Neither character considers what the Settlers are doing to be violent or oppressive. Instead, they’re so convinced that their way of life is the only right or “civilized” way that imposing it on others becomes a justification in and of itself. But what readers have seen already of Jacky’s experience—and of Sister Bagra’s insane punishments—makes the violence clear for what it is.
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Themes
Elsewhere, a woman named Esperance wakes up from an uneasy sleep. Residents of the refugee camp where she lives got their hands on some alcohol and spent the previous night getting drunk and fighting. Esperance’s makeshift shelter can hardly be called a home. But it keeps her relatively warm and dry at night. Although she has few possessions—a candle, two knives, a carved wooden lizard toy, and a tin cup—she knows she’s better off than many of the other refugees in the camp. Sometimes, she feels guilty about not sharing her shelter with someone else, but she prizes her limited privacy.
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Themes
Picking her way around the sleeping forms of the night’s drunken revelers, Esperance makes her way to the camp’s communal campfire, where she finds Grandfather passed out, too. She shakes him awake enough to walk and guides him back to his shack to sleep off his drunkenness. Grandfather founded this camp—for people fleeing encroaching Settlers—on the banks of a dried-up riverbed years earlier, before Esperance was born. No one, not even the two generations of children who were born along the banks of the river, truly belongs there.
Active
Themes
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For a moment as the sun rises, its warm glow suffuses Esperance’s heart with hope and makes camp look almost beautiful. But as it rises higher, it merely illuminates the squalid conditions in which Esperance and the others live. Esperance picks up an abandoned grog bottle and takes it to the camp’s waterhole. After several years of drought, it’s nearly dry and the only chance of getting relatively clean water lies in getting there early in the day. The water doesn’t taste great, and Esperance knows it still might make her sick, but at least it isn’t brown with mud yet. After filling her bottle, Esperance covers the hole with leafy branches to protect the water from evaporation.
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Themes
Every time she walks back into camp, Esperance takes a good look at it, as if it might be the last time she sees it. Even though she doesn’t really consider it home, she doesn’t want to leave, either. But she knows they’ll have to sooner or later, before they run out of water or before the Settlers find them.
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Themes
