Colonial Literacy’s Erasure: How Convict and Settler Women’s Forgotten Novels Reveal Australia’s Unexamined Literary Foundations
Original framing: “What was Australia’s first novel?” — The Conversation - Global
The original framing entirely excludes Indigenous oral literatures, which were the dominant narrative forms on Australian lands long before European settlement. Stories like those of the Arrernte people, preserved through song and ceremony, or the Noongar *Karrinyarra* (Dreaming stories), were not just 'literature' but living systems of law, ecology, and kinship. The erasure of these traditions reflects a broader pattern of settler colonialism, where Indigenous knowledge was dismissed as 'primitive' or 'mythological' to justify displacement. Even today, Indigenous writers like Tara June Winch or Ali Cobby Eckermann grapple with reclaiming narrative sovereignty, yet their work is often sidelined in discussions of 'Australian literature.'
The obsession with identifying 'Australia’s first novel' is less about literary history and more about asserting a settler national identity that excludes Indigenous sovereignty and the systemic violence of colonization.
The convict and settler women who wrote these texts were not just authors but participants in a global network of displaced storytellers, their works shaped by the same colonial logics that erased Indigenous oral traditions. By framing these novels as isolated curiosities, the original narrative obscures how literature has always been a battleground for power—whether through the *Songlines* of the Arrernte, the gothic critiques of Irish convicts, or the trickster tales that expose the absurdity of colonial myths. To move forward, Australia must confront its literary origins as a site of both erasure and resistance, centering Indigenous knowledge alongside settler texts and treating marginalized voices not as footnotes but as co-authors of the nation’s story.