Australia’s official Reconciliation project confronted Australians with the continuous violent dispossession suffered by the country’s Indigenous peoples and the pressing need to offer a public apology to them. While trauma became a tool whereby to create paths of empathy and reconciliation between indigenous and non-indigenous Australians, it was also a manipulative strategy to deny the country’s shameful history. This book examines Gail Jones’s literary contribution to such debates. It examines Gail Jones’s questioning of Australia’s victimology narratives, and offers an insightful discussion of the transmedia, transnational and multidirectional approach to trauma in the reconciliation-related novels she published during John Howard’s vexed Liberal Government (1996-2007).

Pilar Royo-Grasa is Assistant Professor at the English and German Department of the University of Zaragoza, where she teaches courses on English Language and Literature. She has been a Visiting Scholar at the Universities of New South Wales (Australia), Northampton (U.K.) and Regensburg (Germany). She has widely published on Gail Jones’s fiction in internationally indexed journals. Her research interests include contemporary Australian fiction, postcolonial literature, trauma studies, human rights and migration narratives.