The Secret River

Australian writers seem to have strong ties to the histories of their forebears. Thomas Keneally, Richard Flanagan and Roger McDonald are but a few authors who have successfully re-painted history on a fictional canvas. Kate Grenville - who in "Joan Makes History" tried to encapsulate all of [European] Australia's history through one imaginary woman - has narrowed her focus with this book. This account of William Thornhill, transplanted Thames River waterman, depicts the kind of person capable of founding a nation. With excellent insight into a man's ambitions, feelings and needs, Grenville chains the reader's interest from the opening pages. Release comes only at the final page, and while satisfying, leaves one seriously disturbed by the cost of "nation building".

Grenville's story isn't new. Thousands of people were "transported" to Australia after 1788, some escaping the gallows, while the rest relieved the intense pressure of British gaols. Thornhill was lucky in his wife Sal's appeal to escort William being successfully considered. There were few women in Port Jackson, and a wife brought stability. Grenville offers a fine touch of irony in William's being "assigned" to Sal as a "working convict". Again, as he had in London, William becomes a waterman - helping a boat owner ferry cargo up and down the Hawkesbury River. While conveying along the river, Thornhill spots a point of land amenable to homesteading.

Thornhill and Sal begin scrabbling a home in the bush, but immediately confront a major obstacle. The key issue in "founding" the nation of Australia is that it was already occupied. Although the British Privy Council would declare an entire continent "terra nullus" - unoccupied land - , the Aborigines, who had lived there for thousands of years, knew otherwise. Grenville grants Thornhill more humanity than most of his neighbours. Some of that is due to Thornhill's wife, Sal, but the former Londoner isn't a fixed mentality. He's adaptable and enterprising without avarice. Grenville's description of Thornhill's initial and later dealings with the Aborigines, and the many confrontations that occurred as other settlers moved in, forms the centrepiece of her narrative. Europeans were astonished at how easily the Aborigines moved in the forest. Silent, evasive, intimately knowledgeable about the land, the Aborigines were vulnerable only to bullets - and something else the British had available.

While Thornhill wants peaceful coexistence, circumstances force other conditions. Others, of course, are less tolerating and the history of British settlers slaughtering those non-existent Aborigines might have started at Thornhill's Point. The British population, both free and under sentence, is growing. Farming and pasturage put pressures on land unable to support two vastly different lifestyles. The skirmishing diminishes Sal's relationship with her husband. Fearful for their children and herself, she threatens to take them to a settlement for safety. As pressures mount, the interaction of husband and wife grows quietly intense. Grenville portrays the conflicting loyalties - husband and wife, Thornhill and his land, the couple and their neighbours, humanity offsetting avarice - with clarity and feeling. You are kept spellbound as the story takes you to the resolution of this web of emotion.

NOTE: "The Secret River" is the fictional tale of Kate Grenville's own transported London ancestor. Those wishing to understand how history influences a writer's choices are directed to Grenville's "Searching for The Secret River for the effort that went in to making this novel. [stephen a. haines - Ottawa, Canada]

A fascinating story (7/7 people found this helpful)

I picked this book up at a hotel in Vietnam from one of those "take one, leave one" shelves. Having never heard of the author or the book I didn't hold out much hope of enjoying it but thought it might help to pass a bumpy seven hour bus journey I had coming up the next day.

It didn't take long for me to be pulled into the story of Will Thornhill and his feisty wife Sal. A poverty stricken waterman is condemned to hang in early 19th century London but with the help of his wife has his sentence changed to transportation. Some excellent descriptive writings of London scenes and of life in New South Wales. Through hard work and luck Will takes on 100 acres of land on the edge of a river. But there are others lurking and his land which is now legally his - aboriginals. They seem to come and go, taking crops he has grown and showing no `respect' for the new owners. The author does well to view this clash from a 19th century viewpoint. It is too easy to see it from a liberal 21st century standpoint. Will's family shows no concept of what the land means to "the blacks" - there is plenty more land that they can go to, so why should they hang around here?

However one of their sons, Dick, is instinctively attracted to the aboriginal people and begins to learn about their ways until forbidden by Will. (I feel more could have been made of this but perhaps Grenville didn't want to go off at too many tangents)

The optimism of the Thornhill's is tinged with sadness. If Will's family is to remain on "their" land then a solution to the "molestations and depredations" must be found. We know that a tragedy awaits the native people but when it comes it is shocking and horrific.

On the surface this is a good family saga. But it is actually much more than that and raised (in a subtle way) lots of issues about power, class and colonisation. How easily someone who has been a victim can become the bully! Just like the old Yeats' poem about the beggar on horseback lashing the beggar on foot.

A fascinating story about the early times in New South Wales.

I'm glad I picked up The Secret River. I left it in the next hotel and hope that by now someone else has chosen it!

Settlers' Perspectives Challenged (0/0 people found this helpful)

The Secret River by Kate Grenville won the 2006 Orange Prize for fiction. She has spoken about the need to face up to Australia's colonial past, and particularly the white settlers' relationship with the Aborigines. The publication of this novel in 2006 shows that Australia is still coming to terms with its history and its relationship with the Aboriginal peoples. The novel follows the fortunes of William Thornhill from the harsh and brutal world of the Thames to an equally brutal world in Australia, following transportation for theft. The white settlers have to come to terms with an environment and a landscape which is completely alien to them. Thornhill finds it "a place out of a dream, a fierce landscape... [he] felt his eyes wide open, straining to find something he could understand." The narrative is marked by the balance in some of the settlers between progressing in the new land and hankering for a home which is no longer home. Though his wife longs for London, Thornhill feels that it is "a place that was part of his flesh and spirit" and soon both recognise that London is now an alien place which has no reality for their children. The settlers' responses to the peoples who already inhabit the land are mixed. Some adapt and live alongside, but these people are treated with as much suspicion as the Aboriginals themselves by the other white settlers. Having only experienced harshness and summary justice themselves, the settlers inevitably move towards brutal conflict. Though Genville's narrative style does not shirk the brutality of settlers' actions at all, there is a clear understanding of their position. Their own bleak backgrounds, harsh experiences and first taste of freedom and power lead the settlers to aggression, and they do not understand the Aboriginal shifting and nomadic way of life: "There were no signs that the blacks felt the place belonged to them. They had no fences that said this is mine." As Thornhill says, with some sympathy, ""There won't be no stopping us. Pretty soon there won't be nowhere left for you black buggers." Grenville's presentation of the Aboriginal people is sympathetic, granting them a poise and dignity; they are "like part of the landscape", living symbiotically with it and moving through the apparently impenetrable bush with ease. This is contrasted with a settler's view that the only response, echoing Kurtz in Conrad's Heart of Darkness, is to 'sterminate them... ain't it the only way?" It's a fascinating and often moving tale, achieving its effects through plot, though, rather than language.

It is a formidable historical fiction, beautifully imagined and executed (2/2 people found this helpful)

The Secret River is a novel about an emancipist settler in early colonial Australia and it is also a book about the early white encounter with the Aborigines. It is a formidable historical fiction, beautifully imagined and executed, with a good deal of quiet grace before it finally heaves into drama. It is the story of William Thornhill, who works on the Thames in a poverty-pitted London where he is worn down so hard that he is driven to the crime with which he has previously flirted by the grim life-threatening necessities of getting by as he tries to make his way with his beloved wife Sal. As a consequence he is sentenced to death but that is commuted to transportation to New South Wales for the term of his natural life. In practice he is assigned as a convict laborer to his own wife and within a few years he is free entirely. He has come out into the sunshine of an Australia where the country is anyone's to dream of winning. The Secret River is a historical novel, full of contemporary insight and it is also a subtle expression in fictional terms of the myth of collective guilt for the fate of the Aborigines. It is to Kate Grenville's credit that she never surrenders her sense of the individual faces she captures as she tells this story. I suspect a lot of readers are going to find this book both subtle and satisfying. I'd also recommend reading Tino Georgiou's bestselling novel--The Fates--if you haven't yet!

A gripping novel that draws you in (3/3 people found this helpful)

I loved this book. I read it very quickly because it was so hard to put down. Kate Grenville writes beautifully and captures the magic of the Australian landscape.

The story is about William Thornhill who is sentenced to life as a convict in Australia in the early 19th century. The first part of the book concerns his life in Georgian England. He is born into abject poverty and although he tries to make an honest go of it, circumstances lead him into crime. He is convicted of theft and his sentence is to be transported to New South Wales for the term of his natural life. His wife and child accompany him. This part of the book is a little slow, but the momentum picks up once they get to Australia, about 75 pages in.

In Australia, Thornhill discovers that the new country represents a blank slate where he can re-invent himself and break out of the cycle of poverty and crime that he has come from. He quickly wins his freedom and seizes the opportunity to get his own land and create his own farm, staking a claim to 100 seemingly vacant acres of land. However this brings him directly into contact (and potentially into conflict) with the native Aboriginal people.

The book is beautifully written. It really takes you into the world of early colonial Australia and gives you a sense of how difficult a life the early settlers had. The tension builds and builds as it become obvious that some kind of conflict between Thornhill's family and the Aborigines is inevitable. It made me understand the way that good people can be conflicted about what the right thing to do is. Different settlers in the area make different decisions and as you read the book, it you wonder how you would have acted in the same circumstances. But aside from the moral dilemmas, it's just a good story: a man trying to create a new and better life for himself and his family, overcoming many hurdles and setbacks, and gradually realising that the biggest threat of all is right in front of him.

Kate Grenville

Reader Reviews:

A little point of land (0/0 people found this helpful)

A fascinating story (7/7 people found this helpful)

Settlers' Perspectives Challenged (0/0 people found this helpful)

It is a formidable historical fiction, beautifully imagined and executed (2/2 people found this helpful)

A gripping novel that draws you in (3/3 people found this helpful)

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