Claire G. Coleman’s debut novel, Terra Nullius, is a difficult and powerful book set in an Australia under occupation. It starts in medias res with the flight from slavery of a young Native man named Jacky. This sequence may seem historically familiar, as may the word “Native.” But Terra Nullius contains a revision of perspective at about the 120 page-mark that shifts its genre solidly to science fiction and unmoors our understanding of what’s meant by both “Native” and the antithetical term “Settler.”
Before that sudden change, the novel follows Jacky’s escape toward what he hopes may be the family and home-territory he was taken from as a child. We witness his grueling evasion of recapture by Settler forces and are introduced to the colonialist systems that produce Native immiseration and unfreedom. These systems extend from malicious functionaries, like “The Head of the Department for the Protection of Natives,” to established religious orders. In search of his past, Jacky briefly and dramatically returns to the nunnery-run residential school where he spent his youth before being sold out to work as a slave. The “school” is presided over by the violently racist Sister Bagra, who lives with an uneasy awareness that she mustn’t allow HQ to find out about her institution’s growing graveyard for Native children.
In this initial phase of Terra Nullius we are also introduced to a Settler storm-trooper named Johnny Star, who revolts against the terms of his own service after he witnesses a massacre of unequally armed Native civilians. Glimmers of resistance to the colonial project begin to come into view, as Johnny joins up with a group of armed Native outlaws headed by a young man named Tucker, and the outlaws become aware of the existence of a precarious Native settlement that has so far evaded Settler notice. The settlement is a roughly democratic body, and one of the most effective people in it is a young woman named Esperance who will play a major role in the final action of the novel.
Soon, Jacky’s path will intersect with these other parties. Soon, they will all move toward self-defense, toward reluctant exemplarity, toward giving hope and rage to the oppressed.
So far, we could be reading an unsparing historical novel about colonial Australia. But this is where, if you don’t want spoilers about Terra Nullius, you should stop reading. Because next I have to talk about the big plot-reveal.
The big plot reveal is an interstellar invasion. It is by definition a surprise (there’s a grim joke to be made here about nobody expecting an invasion) but quickly makes all kinds of sense for the book’s accomplished conjuring of the apocalyptic Australian Indigenous experience of settler colonialism. Terra Nullius uses the genre-shock of its space-alien invasion to surprise white readers into seeing their own history as rapacious ‘alien’ history, while speaking with understanding and truth to readers personally impacted by the effects of colonialism about their own lived experience.
In pursuit of both of these goals, Coleman employs speculative metaphors that touch on the environmental toll of colonialism—its recklessly introduced new species, its indifferent disruption of existing ecosystems. Searching for water, Jacky must crawl on his belly beneath an invasive alien vine with poisonous thorns. The vine marks the presence of a stream, without which the plant could not survive, but also bars the water from use by any but the most desperate. “If [Jacky] was slow, meticulous and careful, if he dug down into the mud and muck when he needed to, if he was lucky, he might make it into the gully the vine was strangling” (p. 173). And back out again? It’s hard work for a Native to live, in every direction.
Terra Nullius came out in 2017. It’s still timely, in ways not particularly pleasant to think about, but which are—that dreaded word—useful. Some things about the way Terra Nullius has been received, though, suggest that not all of what it’s saying has been…accepted? Noted? Here’s what may be the problem: Terra Nullius is super clear about the fact that the alien invasion has wiped out all sense of racial distinction between humans. And yet, there seems to be a tendency for reviewers to identify the main human characters in this book as Indigenous. I assumed they were too, at first.
Here’s the book, on its own terms:
The arrival of [the aliens] had eliminated all racism and hate within the human species. It was not that with a common enemy the humans decided to work together…[i]nstead the colonization by the Settlers simply ended all discrimination within the human race by taking away all the imbalance…With no distinction between humans, no rights, no countries, the human race was in the process of homogenization. (p. 159)
It’s a strong universalizing statement and not every reader of the book is going to like it. Coleman is resolute, though: in the future world of her novel, no human really cares about race anymore. Terra Nullius argues that conditions under colonial occupation by an offworld power are simply too equally bad for race to matter as a distinguishing factor.1 But I think a lot of readers find it literally unbelievable, for varied and interesting reasons, that a science fiction novel written by an Aboriginal author about the ravages of colonialism would feature white people among its main sympathetic protagonists. And yet, that’s what Terra Nullius does.
Here’s a different reviewer’s description of the leadership of the novel’s Native (i.e. human) outlawry:
Juxtaposed against…the alien invasion as colonial project is a nomadic group of Aboriginal outlaws. . .These “lost souls” are led by the courageous Aboriginal woman Esperance and her grandfather.2
“[T]he courageous Aboriginal woman Esperance.” But Coleman specifically states that Esperance, who at the end of Terra Nullius eponymously holds what little remains of the novel’s hope, is white. Here she is, up early in the remote woods that have been her community’s fragile sanctuary:
She liked the peace, she liked to hunt before the sun hit the sky – it was cooler and more comfortable on her skin that humans had called ‘white’ before the [aliens] came, before skin colour became irrelevant. (p. 257)
In sum, Terra Nullius is an anti-colonial novel in which white people undergo, together with Indigenous, Black and Brown people, the full unthrottled murderous experience of being colonized. And at least one white person ends up taking on the fugitive heroic role of survivor and resister that I think we are more used to seeing Indigenous, Black and Brown characters take on (for good reason) in recent dystopian fiction. But the totally equalizing aspect of Coleman’s racial world-building contradicts some readers’ expectations to such an extent that it’s almost hard for us to see what she’s written, even though the words are right there on the page. Personally, I wonder if the idea of a “homogenized” humanity was hard for me to focus on while reading Terra Nullius because I—a white demigirl, for what it’s worth—find it too grim to imagine a world where we’re so beaten down, deracinated, overworked and information-poor that we can’t argue and worry, discuss and fight and care and learn about racial history anymore. “But for us to get there we’d have to be living in hell on earth,” I think. To which Coleman’s novel says, “Yes.”
1. For a longer review that grapples with this aspect of Coleman’s novel from an Aboriginal perspective, see: https://sydneyreviewofbooks.com/review/terra-nullius-claire-coleman/
2. https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/they-do-not-come-in-peace-on-claire-g-colemans-terra-nullius
