The Novel: Like all white Australian schoolchildren of my generation, I was taught that the colonisation of our continent by the British was a good thing, a 'necessary step' in the so-called 'march of progress' that brought 'civilisation' to what, until Captain James Cook landed his ship the Endeavour at Botany Bay in January 1788, had been a vast untamed island wilderness sparsely populated by 'primitive' dark-skinned people known as Aborigines.
We were never taught that Cook's arrival marked the beginning of what were to be more than two hundred years (and counting) of theft, marginalisation and strategically planned genocide as the steady expansion of white settlement drove Aboriginal people from their ancestral homelands into state and church-run missions set up for the specific purpose of depriving them of their languages, their customs and everything else that gave them their unique racial and cultural identity. For myself and my classmates, the study of Australian history was reduced to learning about Captain Cook, the arrival of the First Fleet of convict ships, the establishment of the first white colony (at what was then called Sydney Cove) and the role that indentured convict labour played in the building of the nation. If we were told anything about the interactions between the country's white invaders and indigenous Australians, it was only that the invaders had been regularly obliged to apply deadly force to subdue 'the Abos' who, when they had not been committing atrocious acts of unprovoked violence against 'innocent' settlers, had been little more than lazy, ignorant, unintelligent and, after their introduction to alcohol, frequently intoxicated parasites.
The invention and extended promulgation of these completely false stereotypes was, of course, shameful. But what did we know? We were children and, in those days, children were expected to accept and believe whatever adults told them without question. Nor did it help that we rarely encountered an Aboriginal person in our day-to-day lives and almost never saw one — with the exception of the occasional dazzlingly talented indigenous athlete — in the mainstream media that, in our limited pre-digital world, consisted of four television networks, dozens of AM radio stations and a not very wide assortment of politically and culturally biased newspapers.
This is why The Secret River is such an important novel and one, I'm pleased to say, that is now studied in many Australian secondary schools. The story of William Thornhill — a London lighterman (cargo hauler) who grows up in dire poverty not far from the River Thames and is transported to Australia for the crime of stealing a consignment of Brazilian lumber from a ship owned by a wealthy timber merchant — begins with an exacting recreation of his Dickensian childhood before plunging the reader into the very different if equally jarring world of the British colony of New South Wales in 1806, the year in which he arrives with his loyal and loving wife Sal and their two young children following what has been, in every respect, a harrowing twelve month voyage from England.
What The Secret River does, with more skill and accuracy than any other work of Australian fiction or history I've read, is reveal how alien the landscape of Australia and its native inhabitants must have seemed to men and women like the Thornhills, people who had been ejected from the densely urban environment of London against their will and dumped in what, to their fretful minds, was an arid antipodean wasteland teeming with dangerous, oddly shaped animals and savage dark-skinned natives who wore no clothes, lacked any conception of private property and lived predominantly nomadic lives governed by the changing of the seasons.
Although he's a convict, Thornhill uses his skills as a lighterman and his almost limitless capacity for hard work to first obtain his freedom and then to obtain what it would have been impossible for him to obtain had he not been convicted of theft and transported to Australia — one hundred acres of fertile farmland located on the banks of the beautiful, still unspoiled Hawkesbury River. All he's required to do to claim outright ownership of what he names Thornhill's Point is build a rudimentary dwelling on his newly occupied plot of land and plant a crop of corn on it. The local blacks whose home the land has been for thousands of years aren't consulted, just as they weren't consulted when Thornhill's neighbours — intelligent men like Blackwood and far less intelligent men like the slovenly and mean-spirited Smasher Sullivan — suddenly appeared to claim their own plots of land before him.
Becoming a landowner represents more than the ability to build a home and grow his own food to Thornhill, somebody who already earns a decent living by ferrying cargo from distant towns like Windsor downriver to the rapidly growing settlement of Sydney. It also represents his one chance to regain the respectability he feared would be lost to him forever the moment he was convicted of larceny and sentenced to death, a sentence that was subsequently commuted to transportation for life thanks to the untiring efforts of his tenacious, formerly well-to-do wife.
As time goes on, Thornhill's Point becomes more than just a crude bark hut plonked down in the middle of what he and his white neighbours warily refer to as 'the forest.' It becomes the repository of all his hopes for himself, Sal and their growing family, a dream of future success that brings him into ever more perilous conflict with the blacks, people whose language he can't speak and whose customs and beliefs he makes no effort to accommodate, much less understand. As he and his fellow invaders see it, it is the blacks, not themselves, who are guilty of trespassing. 'It took him some time to admit,' we're told, 'that
his hundred acres no longer felt quite his own. A small group of the
blacks was always about, even if mostly unseen. Their bodies flickered
among the trees, as if the darkness of the men were an extension of
bark, of leaf-shade, of the play of light on a water-stained rock. The
eye could peer but not know if it was a couple of branches over there,
or a man with a spear, watching.'
Even the patronising act of
bestowing nicknames on some of the black men — Long Bob, Black Dick, the tribal elder Whisker Harry — fails to diminish the threat they represent to Thornhill's dreams of genteel bucolic grandeur, as does Blackwood's advice that he should adopt his
own policy of 'Give a little, take a little' when it comes to
dealing with the blacks, a policy born of necessity in Blackwood's case
because he and his Aboriginal mistress have a young child together whose existence Blackwood wisely prefers not to reveal to moronic racists like Sullivan.
Thornhill's fear of the blacks becomes almost overwhelming when they gather en masse in their camp one night for what he nervously tries to dismiss as 'a bit of a sing song.' Afraid the ceremony may be some form of war dance and the precursor to an attack on his home and family, Thornhill sneaks out of his hut to spy on his black neighbours, only to find himself shocked at the sight of Whisker Harry leading the dance, his old feet thudding heavily into the dust as he leads his people in what, to them, is a timeless and culturally vital ceremony. 'Thornhill remembered that he had slapped him and scolded him like a child. It had been a mistake, and it frightened him now… This man was old in the same way the Governor was old. A man should no more push and slap him than he would the Governor with his shiny sword hanging by his side.' Although the expected attack is never launched, Thornhill's fears for the future do not diminish, his paranoia stoked by the fact that the blacks continue to dance and sing around their campfire for the remainder of that week.
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Text Publishing first Australian edition, 2005
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Even Sal, who is far more tolerant of the blacks as a rule and a figure of fun to their women, senses that something has changed. She stops exchanging sugar for the wooden bowls and digging sticks her giggly new friends sometimes bring her and makes a conscious effort to distance herself from them, her changed attitude encouraging Thornhill to buy more guns and teach his eldest son and their two convicts — as an emancipated settler, Thornhill is entitled to convict assistance but treats the men, one of whom he was friendly with in London, every bit as harshly as he was treated following his own arrival in the new colony — how to use them. He also gets the idea to buy a dog from Sullivan, discovering when he goes to visit his neighbour that Sullivan has recently acquired a black sex slave he shares with another settler, a bleeding, utterly terrified woman they keep locked in chains and routinely threaten to kill by feeding her arsenic.
Confrontation is inevitable. And this is perhaps the most chilling idea presented in The Secret River — that conflict, as Blackwood rightly suggested, could be avoided if only the whites would adopt a 'live and let live' attitude toward the land's traditional owners. Blackwood understands, as a brainless degenerate like Sullivan never could, that the people they describe as 'savages' are not half as savage as themselves, that they are first and foremost human beings who should not be expected to abruptly abandon customs and traditions they've been honouring for thousands of years simply because their skin happens to be black and the land they inhabit happens to be prime riverfront real estate.
This, of course, is the story of colonialism wherever it occurred, be it on the banks of the Hawkesbury River or deep in the Belgian Congo or on the Great Plains of North America throughout the 1870s. In every case, the invaders sought to subjugate the indigenous population via the ultra-effective combination of genocide, imported diseases and cultural erasure, laying the foundations for the hate-driven, increasingly divided world we live in today. It's the sense of inevitability that Grenville captures in The Secret River — the shifting of the white perspective from wariness to amusement to intolerance to lethal violence — that makes it such a tragic novel and, in the end, such an unforgettably powerful one.
As her narrative charts these successively grimmer stages of white/black interaction, Grenville continually reveals that things didn't have to be handled the way they were, that peaceful co-existence could have been possible had it not been for the idea of white supremacy and the unchecked brutality of men like Sullivan, people whose natural sense of inferiority could only be assuaged by shedding the blood of those their fragile egos needed to believe were in turn somehow inferior to them.
The book is as much about class and entitlement as it is about race, defining the so-called 'convict mentality' that is still very much in evidence in Australia and finds its modern expression in what sociologists identify as 'the tall poppy syndrome' — that peculiarly Australian suspicion of any person who attempts, by word or deed, to rise above what is deemed to be an acceptable level of personal and social mediocrity. Convicts hated their masters but they reserved their most virulent hatred for any other convict who sought, as Thornhill ultimately does, to present themselves as being 'better' than the larger group. Sullivan's rage is the rage of a man who can't bear to see other people prosper or find any sort of fulfillment or contentment in their lives, no matter if these people happen to be white, black or any other colour.
Thornhill occupies a state somewhere between Blackwood and Sullivan. He is a hard but basically decent man whose fear of the unfamiliar eventually overwhelms him, pushing him to behave in ways that, while justified as he sees it in order to secure a prosperous future for his family, are nevertheless barbaric and, in the end, unforgivable. In many ways Thornhill symbolises the history of white Australia — a country that still struggles to acknowledge the horrifying treatment meted out to its indigenous population by its colonial invaders, a faction whose claim to the land it stole was based on nothing more remarkable than the fact that it was lighter skinned and had unrestricted access to more efficient, more destructive weapons and the organisational skills required to make the most effective and efficient use of them.
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KATE GRENVILLE, c 1995
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The Writer: Kate Grenville, as she is professionally known, was born Catherine Elizabeth Gee in 1950 and grew up on Sydney's northern beaches. Her father Kenneth Grenville Gee worked as a barrister and District Court judge while her university educated mother Isobel Russell (known as Nance) ran her own pharmacies, another highly unusual achievement — along with possessing a university degree — for an Australian woman of her generation. The youngest of three children, Grenville knew she wanted to be a writer from the age of sixteen.
Grenville attended Cremorne Girls High School before obtaining a Bachelor of Arts degree from Sydney University and, after a period of working as an editor at Film Australia and living in London and Paris, went on to obtain a Masters degree in Creative Writing from the University of Colorado. She returned to Australia in 1983 and spent the next three years employed as an editor in the subtitling department of the Special Broadcasting Service, combining this job — as she had with all her previous jobs — with writing. Her first book, a story collection titled Bearded Ladies, appeared in 1984 and was followed a year later by her debut novel Lilian's Story, a tale based on the life of Bea Miles, a famous Sydney eccentric known for her battles with the city's taxi drivers and her willingness to quote Shakespeare on demand in return for on-the-spot payment. Grenville's novel won the 1984 Vogel Literary Award and served as the basis for a widely acclaimed 1996 film starring Ruth Cracknell and Toni Collette.
Grenville's next two novels Dreamhouse (1986) and Joan Makes History (1988) were critically well received, their subsequent foreign publication helping to consolidate her position as one of Australia's brightest new literary talents. In 1990 she published The Writing Book: A Manual for Writers, a work based on her own experiences as both a writer of fiction and as a teacher of creative writing. This was followed in 1993 by Making Stories: How Ten Australian Novels Were Written, another nonfiction work co-authored with fellow novelist Sue Woolfe. Dark Places, a re-telling of the events depicted in Lilian's Story, appeared in 1994 and won the 1995 Victorian Premier's Literary Award. It was followed by The Idea of Perfection, a novel about two frumpish middle-aged characters who struggle to reconcile themselves to their flawed lives that went on to win the 1999 Orange Prize for Fiction, Britain's most generous and most prestigious literary award at that time. Another nonfiction book titled Writing From Start To Finish: A Six Step Guide appeared in 2001.
The idea to write The Secret River came from the diaries of Grenville's mother, who noted in an early entry that her ancestor — an Essex-born dock worker named Solomon Wiseman — had been transported to the colony of New South Wales in 1806 and was subsequently freed and given a parcel of land that is today known as Wisemans Ferry, a town located 58 kilometres north of Sydney on the banks of the Hawkesbury River.
Originally intending to present the story as a work of history, the book evolved over many drafts into a novel that would go on, when it was published in 2005, to become Grenville's most successful work of literature, selling an estimated 500,000 copies in Australia alone. The book also won many awards, including the 2005 FAW Christina Stead Award, the 2006 Commonwealth Writers Prize and the 2006 Australian Book Industry Australian Book of the Year Award. It was subsequently adapted for the stage in 2013 by playwright Andrew Bovell and for television as a two part mini-series that premiered on ABC-TV in 2015. In 2006 Grenville published The Search for The Secret River, a nonfiction work that describes her writing process and the extensive research that went into the creation of the book she describes as her proudest achievement as a writer.
The Secret River became the first part of a loosely connected colonial trilogy that continued with The Lieutenant (2008) and Sarah Thornhill (2011), the latter serving as a direct sequel to the earlier novel. It was followed in 2015 by the memoir One Life: My Mother's Story and The Case Against Fragrance (2017), another nonfiction work inspired by the adverse health affects Grenville suffered following her lifelong use of perfumes and hair dyes. 'It ought to be a public health issue the way second-hand cigarette smoke
is,' she told The Sydney Morning Herald in a 2015 interview. 'Fragrance is highly toxic; it's not made of flowers, it's made of
chemicals.' Her most recent book, a nonfiction work titled Unsettled that documents a roadtrip she took to visit the places where much of her historical fiction is set, appeared in 2025.
Grenville, who was married to Robert Steiner and then to political cartoonist Bruce Petty from 1988 until they separated in 2015, is the mother of two children and currently lives in the Sydney suburb of Balmain.
