 Book
Reviews
with Robin Osborne
The Secret River
By Kate Grenville
Text $36.95
 Kate
Grenville's long awaited follow-up to The Idea of Perfection, a much more charming
novel, shows terra nullius for the lie it was by dramatising the crimes that were
committed in its name. The scene is frontier life in the early 1800s where white
settlers, mostly pardoned convicts, met Aboriginal civilisation in a clash over
land, resources and culture.
'It was true the blacks had no fields or fences, and built no houses worth
the name, roaming about with no thought for the morrow,' muses the author from
the perspective of William Thornhill - a character based on a forebear - who is
transported to NSW for stealing wood whilst working as a boatman on the Thames
and is now establishing a life by the faraway Hawkesbury.
'They spent every day filling their dishes and fetching the creatures that
hung from their belts. But afterwards they seemed to have plenty of time left
for sitting by their fires talking and laughing and stroking the chubby limbs
of their babies.'
This contrasted notably with his own family who are 'up with the sun, hacking
at the weeds around the corn, lugging water... Certainly no one seemed to have
energy to spare for making a baby laugh.'
The long journey of Thornhill and his wife Sal begins in dockside London where
even his skills and hard work could not provide for a young family. Yielding to
temptation, he is arrested and sentenced to death, successfully appealed on the
basis of a legal quirk that allows him to accompany Sal to NSW as a convict indentured
as her servant.
The family struggles to survive in Sydney until, in 1810, Thornhill receives
the governor's pardon that allows them to seek greener pastures: '... the term
of William Thornhill's natural life had turned out to be four years, five months
and six days.'
Settling on 'Thornhill's Point', a day's boat ride from Sydney yet a 'greater
distance' than that between the colony's capital and London itself, they soon
realise the land is already occupied, albeit in a different way to that practised
by the English.
So begins the family's awkward and ultimately disastrous contact with the area's
Aborigines, initially shy and finally hostile as a result of the brutality meted
out by many, although not all, of the Thornhill neighbours.
The murderous payback raid on the blacks' camp is a chilling climax, typifying
the incidents that seldom made our history books.
- Kate Grenville will be appearing at the Byron Bay Writers' Festival. For tickets
and information phone 6685 6262 or visit the website at www.byronbaywritersfestival.com.
- Books available at Book Warehouse, Keen Street, Lismore
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