Gerald Murnane’s Terra Nullius

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 settler-colonial 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.