There has been, for some time, a debate among researchers of Australian history. Should the moral and psychological dimensions of settler experience be examined, or do we know enough already?

It could be said that creative writers have done much of this work. With a subtlety difficult to achieve in historical research, novelists including Eleanor Dark, Thea Astley, David Malouf, and Peter Carey have represented moments of recognition of the strange and shocking truth of living on land that until recently hosted a wholly different cosmos, hundreds of ancient and distinct societies, where now there is cow, fence, suburb, skyscraper. Recently, Melissa Lucashenko’s Edenglassie (2023) drew on Aboriginal intellectual traditions to show how that cosmos extended through Queensland’s horrifying colonial past into the present – skyscraper be damned.