Fiction

Terra Nullius by Claire G. Coleman

Item: Terra Nullius
Author: Catherine Noske

by Catherine Noske •

December 2017, no. 397

Terra Nullius

by Claire G. Coleman

Hachette, $29.99 pb, 304 pp, 9780733638312

Fiction

Terra Nullius by Claire G. Coleman

by Catherine Noske •

December 2017, no. 397

It is hard to review a novel when you don’t want to discuss two-thirds of it – not because it is not worth discussing, but because doing so risks undermining the genius of the novel’s structure. The blurb of Claire G. Coleman’s début makes clear that the novel is ‘not [about] the Australia of our history’, but for the first third of the novel, this is not readily apparent.

Catherine Noske

Catherine Noske is the editor of Westerly Magazine at the University of Western Australia, where she also teaches in Literature and Creative Writing. She has twice been awarded the Elyne Mitchell Prize for Rural Women Writers, and her current manuscript, the subject of a Varuna Fellowship, was shortlisted for the 2015 Dorothy Hewett Award.