Claire G Coleman’s first novel, Terra Nullius, used speculative fiction to confront the horrors of colonisation and dispossession. Perhaps the biggest influence on her debut was HG Wells’s sci-fi classic The War of the Worlds, which itself was inspired by British colonial treatment of Indigenous Tasmanians. Coleman felt Wells’s book and her own were “approaching the same question from opposite sides”, she told Guardian Australia at the time.
It was a hit: among a long list of other accolades, Terra Nullius saw Coleman win the Norma Kathleen Hemming award, which celebrates Australia’s best science fiction. Last week, the Noongar author returned with her third novel, Enclave, which again weaves a dystopian allegory about the ugly realities of racism – as well as the perils of homophobia, surveillance, greed and privilege. While Terra Nullius was written while travelling around Australia in a caravan, Enclave was penned in a somewhat more ergonomic set-up at home.
