‘Criminal dreaming’: Reimagining Crime and Justice in Australian Aboriginal Crime Fiction

In this article, we analyse Australian Aboriginal crime fiction as a form of world crime fiction that draws on the genre’s globally recognisable devices while at the same time localising them in a specific regional setting. This localisation results in two distinctive features. On the one hand, Aboriginal crime fiction is characterised by a critical revision of crime fiction tropes that are unworkable in the Aboriginal context; specifically, it tends to invert the investigator/criminal dichotomy, challenge investigative practices based on Western epistemologies, and undermine the solution of the murder mystery as a final point of truth and redemption. On the other hand, Aboriginal crime fiction infuses the crime narrative with the traumas, aspirations and knowledges of Australia’s Aboriginal population; in analysing this aspect, we focus on the close relationship in Aboriginal thought between women’s bodies and ‘Country’ as a landscape infused with history, living connections and spiritual depth. We conclude by arguing that the hybrid nature of Aboriginal crime fiction enables different modes of reception: using familiar literary forms to introduce non-Aboriginal readers to Aboriginal culture while also serving as a form of truth-telling that re-frames national narratives about Australia’s colonial beginnings.