A note from the authors

About this series

Second Nations People is fiction.

It's speculative fiction in the tradition of Philip K. Dick and The Man in the High Castle: an Australia that might have existed if a few things had gone differently. It's built to make you think, not to predict anything or to accuse anyone.

The Concord Party, the Compact, the Harmony Bureau and every character in these stories are invented. No real party, government, community or person is depicted, and none is accused of anything. The story isn't a coded message, and nothing in it is a call to action.

The people who resist in it do so by listening carefully, keeping honest records and refusing to inform on their neighbours. They never harm anyone. That's the point of the series, not a detail of it.

If it leaves you uneasy about real things — surveillance, who holds power, who gets counted as belonging — the story points to the ordinary answers: ask questions, read widely, vote, and look after the people around you.

The idea of "Second Nations" is a mirror held up to settler and migrant Australia. It doesn't claim that anything in the story is the same as what happened to the First Peoples of this continent, and First Nations characters and culture are developed with First Nations writers and consultants.

— The authors

This series is set on Kaurna Country. We acknowledge the Kaurna people, the Traditional Custodians of the Adelaide Plains, and pay our respects to Elders past, present and emerging.