Wild Cat Calling was the first novel published by an Indigenous author in Australia, in 1965.

Mudrooroo’s novel follows an Aboriginal man navigating surveillance, institutional violence, and social exclusion in a settler-colonial state that offers no stable ground. It does not explain itself for a white readership, and it refuses uplift or reconciliation as narrative reward. 

Read now, the book functions both as a literary landmark and as a document that shows many of the forces it describes—policing, control, fragmentation, enforced visibility—remain unchanged.

Its importance lies not only in being “first,” but in how clearly it exposes the conditions under which Indigenous writing entered Australian literary space at all.