'A Frances Johnson is a poet, novelist, artist and teacher of creative writing. This book is the result of research she undertook as a PhD student at the University of Melbourne, where she is now the Head of Creative Writing in that University’s School of Culture and Communication. It took me a little while to apprehend the form of this book, because it was slightly novel to me. It is a study of the Australian ‘postcolonial novel’. What is meant by this is that bracket of Australian fiction written between the 1980s and the current moment (1989-2014, in fact) and which deals with the dire consequences that European colonisation had for Indigenous Australia. Johnson’s case studies are Kim Scott, Peter Carey, Kate Grenville, Matthew Kneale, Richard Flanagan, Rohan Wilson … and herself.'(Introduction)