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This talk situates Gerald Murnane’s early fiction within the imaginative structures of terra nullius. While Murnane is typically read for his preoccupation with the correspondence of word and world, I argue that his landscapes are also colonial terrains, figured through the juridical and literary logics of emptiness. “Land Deal” (1980) revisits the episode of John Batman’s treaty with the Wurundjeri, recasting it as a negotiation conducted in dreams. The story underscores the asymmetry between settler possessiveness and Indigenous belonging, showing how textual instruments—contracts, deeds, narrative voice—transform absence into alienable property. The Plains (1982) extends this idea, imagining a society of landowners who, sustained by vast estates, devote themselves not to cultivation but to the imaginative labor of cartography, heraldry, and aesthetic speculation. Here the plains are less geography than projection: a conceptual void filled by proprietary visions that aestheticize dispossession. Taken together, these works exemplify how Murnane’s fiction stages the passage from myth to materiality characteristic of terra nullius. Far from retreating into parochial inwardness or pure ideation entirely sequestered from history, Murnane’s landscapes illuminate the colonial condition of seeing land “as if” vacant. His oeuvre reveals that law and literature share a reliance on narrative to convert emptiness into possession, myth into enduring reality.

Speaker bio:

Jack Quirk is a final year PhD candidate in the English Department at Brown University and Assistant Editor at Novel: A Forum on Fiction. His work appears or is forthcoming in Modern Fiction Studies, European Journal of English Studies, Law, Culture, and Humanities, Journal of Modern Literature, Law and Literature, and Modernism/modernity Print Plus.

Presented as part of the 2025 Centre For Australian Literary Cultures (CALC) seminar series.