Australian novelist George Turner (1916–1997) has never had a large readership in Australia, but he remains a big name in SF circles in the USA. My paper examines the posthumous novel for which he won the Arthur C. Clarke Award for Best Novel. Down There in Darkness (1999) is a haunting tale about two men who are cryogenically frozen and who awaken two centuries later to find themselves in a completely unfamiliar Australia, one that because it has undergone climatic catastrophe, has been reborn with genetic scientists in charge.  Reproduction in this new world involves white people mating with Aboriginal Australians because they are seen by these scientists as the only race genetically and culturally suited to long term human survival.  The novel is futuristic, but it is also a reflection on current Enlightenment political, biopolitical and epistemological practices and how these will need to change if the human race is to survive into the future. Turner, I argue, regarded fiction as a medium through which to address what he viewed as pressing global problems. I argue that although he made innovative use of SF writers like HG Wells, Olaf Stapledon and Ursula Le Guin, arguably his greatest innovation, as evidenced by this novel, was to portray the compact between ordinary working class citizens and Indigeneity as part of the solution to the looming problems of scientific hubris, social inequality and climate change.