And the ship sails on

Intertextual spins on Peter Carey’s 1988 novel Oscar and Lucinda may yet be finding new reading congregations. Carey’s progenitive postcolonial novel refuted landscapes empty of First Nations peoples, less jewel horizon than abject mire and macadam, along which the failed preacher Oscar and his party moved the components of a glass church overland and upriver to Edenic rural Bellingen. A metaphor of failed settler hopes and dreams, the fabulist glass church leitmotif is symbolic of white intrusion, as an omniscient Aboriginal narrator observes in the chapter savagely and simply entitled ‘Glass Cuts’.

It has been a while since white historical novelists delved boldly into magical realms, evoking communities grown in unheimlich clusters over unceded land. Meanwhile, Aboriginal realist techniques have flourished in the novels of Alexis Wright and in stories such as Ellen Van Neerven’s ‘Water’ (Heat and Light, 2016). Such works resist Eurocentric lineages of magical realism, evoking Country-specific stories of spirituality and belonging that do not subjugate Indigenous knowledges or reductively romanticise ‘Blak works’ as purely magical.