AustLit

'CLAIRE G. COLEMAN’S 2017 novel Terra Nullius joins a body of texts expanding on Gerald Vizenor’s groundbreaking 1978 apocalypse novel, Darkness in Saint Louis: Bearheart. Responding to the economic chaos, geopolitical instability, and warfare resulting from conflicts over oil and other nonrenewable resources in the 1970s, Vizenor’s story offered a glimpse into the future of Native writing, on the “slipstream” of history, as he called it. Vizenor’s story also serves as a reminder that colonialism is not a destination but an ongoing process, a point Coleman reiterates in Terra Nullius. In much the same way that Vizenor infused Anishinaabe epistemology and other forms of Indigenous knowledge in his writing, featuring “trickster hermeneutics” that overturn the “terminal creeds” of American and European imperialism in the Americas, Coleman offers readers a Noongar Aboriginal perspective on Australian history that challenges colonial conceptions of history.' (Introduction)