« Vulnerable settler colonialism: Oliver Baker, ‘Embattled Settler Colonialism in John Rollin Ridge’s Joaquín Murieta’, ESQ: A Journal of Nineteenth-Century American Literature and Culture, 71, 4, 2025, pp. 443-481
Settlers to the German colony: Kaisa Langer, ‘New Farmers for Germany’s Oldest Colony: German farm workers in Estonian and Baltic German Media’, Copernico, 2024 »

Terra nullius dreaming: Jack Quirk, ‘Gerald Murnane’s Terra Nullius’, Modern Fiction Studies, 71, 4, 2025, pp. 813-839

15Dec25

Abstract: This essay considers the legal and literary construction of terra nullius through the early fiction of Australian author Gerald Murnane. Focusing on The Plains and “Land Deal,” I explore how Murnane puts to work settlercolonial myths of empty land, property, and possession. By staging rival ontologies of land between Indigenous custodianship and settler commodification, I suggest that this work dramatizes the imaginative and juridical mechanisms by which terra nullius was rendered present and real. Murnane’s fiction can be thought of as an implicit challenge to the colonial impulse to impose meaning, revealing the enduring tension between narrative, law, and landscape.


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