{"version":"1.0","type":"rich","provider_name":"Acast","provider_url":"https://acast.com","height":250,"width":700,"html":"","title":"Terra Nullius: Claire G. Coleman's Aboriginal Allegory of Alien Occupation","thumbnail_width":200,"thumbnail_height":200,"thumbnail_url":"https://open-images.acast.com/shows/6a28001ca917ce4c7065c483/125ec8cb-c669-40e8-a9e3-b1118a25a664.jpg?height=200","description":"*Terra Nullius* (2017) by Claire G. Coleman — a Wirlomin Noongar woman from Western Australia — is a science fiction novel that begins by appearing to describe colonial-era Australia through historical fiction. Settlers have colonised a planet, removed the Natives from their lands, placed their children in re-education camps, and hunted those who resist. The novel's central revelation — that the 'Settlers' are not British colonisers but alien beings from another world — arrives as a gut-punch that forces readers to experience the history of Aboriginal dispossession through the defamiliarising lens of SF. Coleman wrote the novel while travelling around Australia in an old caravan, and it was developed through the black&write! Indigenous writing and editing project at the State Library of Queensland (Coleman won the 2016 fellowship). The novel won the 2018 Norma K. Hemming Award and was shortlisted for the 2017 Aurealis Award and the 2018 Stella Prize. Coleman has spoken about how science fiction gave her a way to tell truths about colonialism that realist fiction could not, because the genre's estrangement effect bypasses readers' defences. The title refers to the legal fiction used to justify the British colonisation of Australia — the claim that the land was 'nobody's land' before European arrival — a doctrine overturned only in 1992 by the Mabo v Queensland (No 2) High Court decision. This episode would explore Coleman's biography, the black&write! project, the novel's narrative structure and its central twist, and its place in a growing tradition of Indigenous Australian speculative fiction (including Ellen van Neerven and Ambelin Kwaymullina). Thematic contribution: *Terra Nullius* reveals how the language of science fiction — aliens, settlers, natives — is already the language of colonialism, showing that the genre has always been telling this story, and that those who lived it are the ones who can tell it most truthfully. HCI: 4 — the novel is a published, award-documented work; Coleman's biography and the black&write! project are well-attested.","author_name":"Atween Studios"}