The stranger in a strange place is an enduring narrative in Australian fiction. But what if the crime scene is a whole continent?

‘The fictional Leap could be in any Australian state or territory. It is ubiquitous for its violent connotation – the history of terror and colonial massacre seared into the landscape.’ Photograph: Image Professionals GmbH/Alamy

Non-Indigenous Australians of my generation might have fleetingly pondered the curious names that flashed past the car windows on long ago family road trips – Massacre Bay, Skull Hole, Butchers Creek. Too few, however, might contemplate today how it feels to be dispossessed in a continent replete with topography, public buildings and institutions named in honour of your people’s murderers – names celebrating the very acts of massacring Indigenous people without commemorating those murdered. Just on that, at least 10 places in Queensland alone are named Skeleton Creek. Discuss.

Much contemporary Australian crime fiction is set in farms, small towns, the hostile bush and the red dusty expanses of various deserts; rural landscapes from which Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people would probably have been violently dispossessed and massacred after European invasion.