AustLit

'This paper explores the work of Matilda Evans, a prolific writer of domestic novels, and argues for her books' highly political status as works that were engaged in narrating the "nation" in nineteenth-century South Australia and creating a foundational narrative for the young settler community. The body of literature Evans produced represents a homely, familiar South Australian landscape and its ideal colonists. In these texts, Indigenous peoples are almost totally absent. Within Evans's texts, belonging is evaluated according to the criteria of middle-class domesticity. By these benchmarks, the presence of Idigenous people in South Australia is contested and their rights of belonging are denied. Evans's words, far from being trivial, are seen as performing the ideological work of "Terra Nullius".' (105)