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Book Review
| Kate Grenville, The Secret River, Text Publishing, Melbourne, 2005. pp. 334. $39.95 cloth.
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| Kate Grenville's latest novel, The Secret River, presents a revisionist history of contact between the early colonists and Aboriginal people in the opening decade of the nineteenth century. It explores the collision of cultures that occurred between these groups, raising questions of identity and belonging, and writing the violence back into the story of early frontier contact. |
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The Secret River follows the life of William Thornhill, born into a large and poor family in London in the late eighteenth century. Thornhill is a decent but pragmatic man who supplements his small income with petty theft, which eventually leads to his transportation to New South Wales in 1806. Accompanied by his wife, Sal, and their small child, Thornhill begins his new life in the colony as Sal's convict labourer. On securing a pardon after five years, Thornhill travels up the Hawkesbury River to, literally and metaphorically, carve out a Paradise where he is Adam. Contrary to what he initially thinks, this paradise is not a 'blank slate' on which 'a person was entitled to draw any picture they fancied' (p. 319), but the home of a group of Aboriginal people who are connected with the land in ways Thornhill, with his property-based, Old World value system, cannot comprehend. The different approaches of the Aboriginal people and the colonists to land ownership inevitably lead to misunderstandings and conflict, escalating to a massacre in which Thornhill is implicated. |
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The concern for writing-in the forgotten or suppressed history of Australia's Aboriginal people has received considerable attention over the past decades with works by historians such as Henry Reynolds (The Other Side of the Frontier and Why Weren't We Told?) and novelists like Richard Flanagan (Gould's Book of Fish) reassessing what many consider to be the misshapen and idealised version of Australia's colonial past we have inherited. These works are informed by recent public debates about what counts as 'History' and historical fact. Some critics have accused this questioning of the conventions on which historical thought operates as leading to postmodernist relativity. Other critics, such as Stephen Muecke, see new ways of experimenting with history and asking 'what if?' questions in a more positive light, as opening up new areas of investigation, such as Aboriginal history. |
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Grenville's novel falls clearly into the 'what if?' camp, asking what if there was a different version of the history of contact between the early settlers and Aboriginal people than that which is couched in the imperialist lingo of 'settlement' and 'heroic progress'? The novel states: 'Nothing was written on the ground. Nor was it written on any page. But the blankness itself might tell the story to anyone who had eyes to see it' (p. 325). |
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Alongside the fictional story of Thornhill's life, Grenville charts a social history of England and colonial Australia in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, reflecting the archival research she conducted in writing the book. In the opening sections, Grenville describes the living conditions of the poorer classes in England in relief against the leisure and arrogances of the gentry. Moving to Australia, Grenville touches on the corruption of the colonial administrators, and outlines the fair deal the government considered they were giving settlers in granting them free land holdings in exchange for farming the land and pushing back 'the Natives'. Grenville describes the consequences for the Aboriginal population of this fair deal: the sickness, the effects of the introduction to alcohol, and the physical displacement of the Aboriginal population as the colony expanded: 'The more civilised folk set themselves up on their pieces of land, the more those other ones could be squeezed out' (p. 121). |
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While we could piece together this social history from the archive, it is Grenville's recreation of the colonists' encounters with the Aboriginal people that brings the historical facts into a realm we can imaginatively inhabit; we read with horror as Thornhill's fellow colonists boast to him of capturing Aboriginal women, collecting hands and ears, and pickling heads. |
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Grenville's portrayal of Thornhill is one of the most unique aspects of the novel. In creating him, she has not drawn a classical hero who we unhesitatingly trust to guide us along the moral path of the story. On the one hand, Grenville portrays Thornhill as a decent man primarily concerned with protecting his family and place, and who is bewildered and unsettled by the brutal attitudes of the other settlers towards the Aborigines. On the other hand, he embodies the prejudices of his culture and firmly believes he is entitled to occupy the 'empty' land; this otherwise decent man eventually participates in a massacre. |
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Grenville in no way apologises for Thornhill's bigotry, or is ambivalent about his complicity in the fate of the Aboriginal people or about the violent consequences of colonialism in Australia. Rather, she has created a character who provokes our sympathy but whose incapacity to deal with the contradictions of his situation ultimately contributes to murder. Grenville draws him and asks us what we make of him. |
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The Secret River is an elegantly written and intensely engaging novel that contributes to the current reassessment of the contact between the Aboriginal population and the colonists. It clearly and ultimately condemns both the literal violence of this contact and the symbolic violence of misrepresenting Aboriginal history, and provokes us to consider what it means to say, as Jack, the leader of the Aboriginal tribe says, slapping the ground and caressing the dirt, 'This me ... my place' (p. 329). |
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| Australian National University |
AMANDA CRAWFORD | |
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