Terra Nullius

Based on a true story; Terra Nullius is an historical fiction that chronicles the events of the 19th century through the eyes of the unfortunate race who, at the time, just happened to occupy the best piece of real-estate in the southern hemisphere.

It’s no secret that history is written by the victors and conquerors. More often than not, characters in history are portrayed two dimensionally; with, inevitably, no recourse for the disenfranchised depiction. Invaders can, and do, present their own version of events with dry statements of the facts, from their point of view; casting themselves, historically speaking, in a softer, fuzzier light.

The facts of this story however are indisputable; aliens invaded the Caretakers’ land and proclaimed the land 'Terra Nullius' (land of none): a neutral or uninhabited area or land not under sovereignty of any recognised political entity and therefore theirs for the taking; with no regard for, or consideration of, the standing residents. Displacing them, the invaders stole their women and systematically murdered, raped and pillaged; spreading disease and decimating their number into virtual extinction.

All the characters in this story are actual historical persons; their stories are dramatisations built around factual events. A central character is Trucannini, who witnessed the rape or murder, or both, of her sisters, mother and brother, and the mutilation and murder of her fiancé, and was herself pack raped; all by her sixteenth year. Beginning around two hundred years ago; it took just seventy years to all but obliterate a race of people who had taken care of their land for more than forty thousand years.

For such a huge, systematic atrocity to have occurred in our quite recent past; an episode that is not taught, as a matter of fact, in Australian history lessons; a chapter that is not common knowledge even in Tasmania, let alone Australia and the world at large, is quite unbelievable, and an indication of the massive guilt buried deep within the Australian and especially Tasmanian psyche.

Terra Nullius is a tale that weaves its way very tightly around the recorded facts of that period; without the gloss, without the whitewash, without the colonial mindset slant that anything written about that era generally contains. Calling a spade a spade, an invader an invader, Terra Nullius gives a very human face, with all the complexities that entails, to the people who were the standing residents of Tasmania, formally Van Diemen's Land; originally simply The Land.

Filling in the blanks, so to speak; I have fleshed out the stories behind the facts, presenting probabilities that are far more plausible than those shrewdly alluded by the conquerors, from their colonial point of view.