Writing by migrant authors constitutes the bulk of Australian literature, yet more often than not ‘migrant writing’ is used as a de facto label to indicate writing by non-anglophone authors. A further distinction is made with refugee writing, which is treated as a discrete subcategory within the larger field of migrant experience. This chapter restores migrant status to that of Australian settler writing, highlighting the ways in which Australian settler identity is formed through the repression of its migrant origins. It locates this impulse to distance settler identity from migrancy in the founding doctrine of terra nullius (used to justify the British colonisation of Australia), suggesting that this might be considered as a collective trauma, a mechanism that erased not only the country’s Aboriginal history but also its migrant past. Through a comparative analysis of works by Aboriginal authors Claire G. Coleman and Alexis Wright, migrant writers J. M. Coetzee and Felicity Castagna, and the refugee journalist and autobiographer, Behrouz Boochani, this chapter demonstrates the extent to which Australia has been invented by migrants and the migrant experience.

This chapter starts by locating Indigenous Australian science fiction, increasingly described as ‘Indigenous futurism’, within the broader framework of Australian sf and Indigenous Australian literature. Indigenous sf has had to contend with reader expectations of Indigenous writing, largely regarded by publishers, booksellers and critics as a niche market, thereby consigned within a very narrow box. Compounding this is the belief that some sf is frivolous, and thus inadequate to address Indigenous affairs. The following section traces the naissance of Indigenous sf in the writing of Sam Watson, Eric Willmot and Archie Weller. The aim is to demonstrate how these works revised mainstream sf by ‘Indigenising’ its tropes, and how the reception of these works has been changing from the 1990s onwards. The third section focuses on twenty-first-century Indigenous sf with Indigenous women authors taking over the global Indigenous sf literary scene. These women authors question traditional paradigms by fusing Indigenous systems of knowledge with the latest scientific thought. This discussion is exemplified by Alexis Wright’s, Claire G. Coleman’s and Ambelin Kwaymullina’s works. The final section demonstrates that Indigenous novelistic futurism has also been augmented by recent developments in Indigenous sci-fi television series and graphic novels.