This chapter considers Christina Stead as a transnational writer, who travelled across continents and through political contexts. It argues that her work is bound together by a “marine aesthetics” and surveys how this plays out in the key phases of writing life: an early period in London and Paris, a middle period in America, and late period, in Europe, England, and Australia. Stead is a political writer of the twentieth century, but also a formal realist whose works continue to challenge the novel genre today.

More than four decades before the USA and Spain engaged in the open warfare that resulted in the end of direct Spanish imperialism in the western hemisphere, a minor diplomatic incident nearly plunged the two countries into early war. On February 28, 1854, the cargo steamship the Black Warrior entered the port of Havana as it had dozens of times previously, but on this occasion, the ship was seized by the Spanish colonial authorities. Under the leadership of Captain Bullock, the ship, with its cargo of goods and transit passengers, was detained, accused of failing to pay taxes on the commercial goods. A dispute over a mere technicality about the ship’s right to modify its customs declarations escalated into a full-blown international incident that immediately drew national and international attention, and even US President Pierce and the House of Representatives issued an official public inquiry into the matter.1 After several weeks of tense exchange and negotiations, the ship and its cargo were released with a fine of approximately $6000. The matter had, it seemed, been put to rest; however, the fallout of the affair simmered and intensified, threatening to trigger a war and exposing some of the most important issues affecting the nation.

The countries of Australasia, from the continent of Australia to the many small island nations of the Pacific, were colonised by European imaginations as places of strangeness or paradisiacal wonder. Those fantasies stand in stark contrast to the brute realities of colonialism. This chapter examines how Australasian magical realist literature ironises and destabilizes the 'beautiful lies' of colonialism. This chapter's overview is focused on Australia and Aotearoa/New Zealand, where the circumstances of colonisation encouraged dominant traditions of fiction writing. However, the chapter also recognises how magical realist literature from Australasia engages traditional forms of storytelling to rupture the hegemonies of empire. Indeed, Indigenous authors have been significant contributors to Australasian magical realist writing, which ironises and destabilizes the 'beautiful lies' of colonial history to represent experiences of trauma and dispossession, but also to assert a dynamic and polysemous sense of survival embodied in the dynamic and polysemous nature of magical realist fiction itself.