AustLit

'A third of the way through Jock Serong’s sixth novel, The Settlement, a woman asks her new husband a pointed question about Wybalenna, the desolate Tasmanian community in which she finds herself, a community of duplicitous, expedient, and brutally deranged white men and the First Nations Tasmanians they seek to subjugate. ‘How will it end? His wife had asked him when she first arrived. Will the paddock fill and the people empty? Will there be another paddock after this one, if there are more people coming?’ Her husband, the storekeeper of the settlement, is witness to the grim activities of the governing group. He sees terrible cruelties he is largely powerless to prevent. The paddock she asks about is a cemetery. She is describing genocide, not through the widespread slaughter of Tasmanian Aboriginal people on their traditional lands, which has been the pretext for persuading them to join the community, but through deaths caused by disease and displacement. Paddocks imply farming. Her question highlights the morbid and seemingly perpetual industry of death and colonisation, and its horror. This is the subject of Serong’s confronting novel.' (Introduction)