Kate
Grenville got more than she bargained for when she set out to write a history
book about her great-great-great grand-father, Solomon Wiseman. The idea had
come about after the Australian novelist joined the 2000 Reconciliation Walk
cross Sydney Harbour. With more than 250,000 people taking part, the walk was a
major statement in acknowledgement of Australia’s colonial past and its
treatment of the country’s indigenous Aboriginal community, as well as present
day disenfranchisement. In what was the largest political demonstration
Australia had seen, for Grenville, it was something of a wake-up call.
The book
that eventually resulted, The Secret River, became, not a biography of her
ancestor, but a fictional epic about the fractious relationship between English
settlers and existing Aborigine society, who have their land robbed while those
who took it grow wealthy on the back of their presumptuousness. This is seen
through the eyes of a man called William Thornhill, whose origins are similar
to Grenville’s ancestor.
“My
great-great-great grand-father was a convict,” says Grenville, as Andrew
Bovell’s stage adaptation of her book for Sydney Theatre Company arrives at
Edinburgh International Festival this week. “He stole wood and was transported
from England to Australia, where he ‘took up land’, as it was described. That
phrase stuck in my mind, and in 2000 there was this big moment to acknowledge
our part in how the Aboriginal community were treated.
“When
I took part in the march, I met this Aborigine woman, and she and I exchanged a
look. It was a moment of acknowledgement about what happened, and I knew my
great-great-great grand-father had been there, and she knew her own ancestors
had been there, and I knew that they would have been the people driven from
their land by my great-great-great grand-father. I realised as well that rather
than saying the settlers ‘took up land’, that it was better and more accurate
to say that they ‘took land.”
When
she wrote The Secret River over five years prior to its publication in 2005,
Grenville was aware that she was putting her head above the parapet in terms of
fictionalising a still emotionally charged part of her country’s history. The
critical and public response to the book, however, suggested she had hit a
nerve, and that there was a desire from both white and indigenous Australians
to unearth the country’s hidden history. Published in the UK by Edinburgh’s
Canongate imprint, Grenville’s novel went on to win numerous awards, including
the Commonwealth Writers Prize, and was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize.
The Sydney
Theatre Company first produced Bovell’s stage version in 2013, and is performed
in the Aboriginal Dharug language as well as English, with the story narrated
by an indigenous guide.
“The
play does something I didn’t do,’ says Grenville. “The book is seen solely
through the main character’s eyes, but the play does something more daring, and
looks at things from both sides, from both the Aborigine characters and the
settler characters. So it’s about two families, one who’ve lived there for
forty or fifty years, the other who has just arrived, and they have no language
in common. When the settler characters realise the Aborigine characters are
speaking in a language they don’t understand, it’s a remarkable piece of
theatre.”
Grenville was more cautious in her approach when writing her novel.
“There
were places I felt I couldn’t go,” she says. “To step into the Aborigine world
would risk appropriating their culture, and I didn’t want to do that. In terms
of the book, there was a huge generosity from the Aborigine community. They’ve
suffered huge losses, and to be frank those losses have come because we’ve
taken things off them, but the book says to look at what happened, which came
about because of people telling lies. In terms of the play, I have to pay
tribute to the Aboriginal actors, who are being asked to perform something that
was hugely traumatic in terms of what happened to their people.”
Since
The Secret River was published, Grenville has written two other novels looking
at colonialism in Australia. The first, The Lieutenant, published in 2008, is
set thirty years before The Secret River, while Sarah Thornhill, dating from
2011, is a more explicit sequel, focusing on William Thornhill’s youngest
daughter.
“I’ve
always hated historical fiction,” Grenville says. “so when I found myself
writing a historical book I wasn’t sure about it. But I write books that are
set in the past, and I don’t know where fact and fiction ends.”
Grenville
also wrote a non-fiction follow-up to The Secret River. While not the one she
originally intended, Searching for the Secret River nevertheless looks into her
methodology in her original research for her novel. There has also been an
Australian television adaptation of The Secret River, which shows just how much
Grenville’s book has impinged on her country’s national consciousness.
“It’s
very hard to judge what effect the book has or hasn’t had,” she says, “but I
was told the Australian Prime Minister, Scott Morrison, was talking about
Aboriginal issues and mentioned the book. I didn’t vote for him, so I have
mixed feelings about that, but it seems as well to have gone beyond the country
itself. I wrote the book at a particular time, and I think it captured
something about that time. A lot of things that came out of looking into my
family history opened up something that went beyond that.
“There
are no easy answers about seeing people’s history decimated over some piece of
land. The answer is, rather than lying, tell the truth about it. One thing you
can do to try and resolve things is to look at what happened, because as long
as you’re telling lies about it, you’re never going to get anywhere.”
The
Secret River, Edinburgh International Festival @ King’s Theatre, Edinburgh,
preview August 2, 7.30-10.20pm, August 3-10 (not August 5), 7.30-10.20pm,
August 3, 8, 10, 11, 1.30-4.20pm.
The Herald, August 2nd 2019
ends
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