Kooroona: a Tale of South Australia, a novel published in Britain in 1871 under the pseudonym of Iota, poses a challenge to the social imaginary of colonial South Australia as the ‘Paradise of Dissent’. It contests the key features of the foundational story of the South Australian colony and casts a new and critical light upon the dissenters, who had hitherto been accorded an important role in that foundational narrative. Much of the novel's critique of colonial South Australia focuses upon the white settlers’ cruel treatment of the Indigenous peoples. In exploring Kooroona's challenge to the colonial foundational story, this chapter examines the circumstances of the novel's creation and the involvement of its author in struggles during the 1860s to improve the life chances of Aboriginal people who were faced by the onslaught of a violent settler community that was dominated by Methodist and other dissenters.

Unlike other Australian colonies, the colony of South Australia was founded in 1836 by free settlers, rather than convicts, and the ‘voluntary principle’ of religious affiliation was enshrined. Subsequently the notion of the South Australian colony as a ‘Paradise of Dissent’ was elaborated in representations of the colony by a number of South Australian writers, such as Matilda Evans and C.H. Spence, and public figures from before settlement; it was also later analysed in Douglas Pike in Paradise of Dissent: South Australia, 1829-57 (see Pike).