I recently a few happy days staying with a friend in Cornwall. A former teaching colleague, she is a drama specialist who, like me, became a professional writer when she left teaching. She has written many hugely successful resources for schools and is a published novelist. As you can imagine, she and I never stop talking from the moment we get up until the minute we say goodnight. I probably have more in common with her than with anyone else I know. We know the same plays, read the same books and listen to the same music.
Anyway, knowing she’d be intrigued, I told her about the 5* (in my opinion) production of Our Country’s Good which I had just reviewed at Lyric Hammersmith and took her the programme because I knew she’d be as familiar with the play as I am with my back garden. That led to her asking if I’d read Kate Grenville’s The Secret River (2005) because it is about the penal colony in Sydney, the birth of “westernised” Australia, and the repression of native Australians so there’s some overlap. I hadn’t. So she gave me her copy.
It’s beautifully researched, raw and heartbreaking. William Thornhill is a lighterman on the Thames. He comes from a very poor family but gets a break as an apprentice and marries the boss’s daughter which is a strong love match. Then a mistake leads to arrest for theft and a death sentence which is, at the last minute, commuted to deportation. Sal goes with him and their second child is born at sea. Because she is a free woman, Will is assigned to her as her servant once they reach Sydney so they can live in relative, if impoverished, freedom and start an inn business in their makeshift hut.
Sal is counting the days, months and years before they can return to London but Will yearns for something of his own – and land is nearby and available cheaply. Except that it isn’t because it is already occupied by people who’ve been there for millennia living quietly and competently in communities, catching the occasional kangaroo by enticing it into new plant growth and then expertly spearing it.
The main focus in this novel is the clash between the two groups and it’s utterly heart-breaking. It’s presented from the point of view of the white settlers, with their understandable but – to us in the 21st century – unjustified sense of entitlement. They are terrified of the “blacks”, their spears, shameless nakedness and what looks to them like insolence. Grenville, however, makes sure that we can also see exactly what these native Australians are seeing and thinking and makes the reader long for someone to start breaking down the cultural barriers and finding ways for the two groups to communicate. There’s a wonderful moment when Dick, one of the Thornhill children, is spotted in the river playing naked with the black children. But of course, his mother calls him in. Neither of the Thornhills are bad people. They just want the best for their children and there’s a huge gulf caused, by language, culture, custom and, of course, the obvious point that invaders are never going to be welcome anywhere. And that’s what these emancipists were. On the other hand, it’s a huge country and there was probably room for both communities to live peacefully side by side but it would have needed empathy and a recognition that of course black people have rights too but here we are 200 years later still having to say it.
Some of the brutality in The Secret River is so appalling that it made the soles of my feet go clammy – my personal physical reaction to anything really shocking. And of course, we all know that the invaders got their way in the end and Australia developed as a British Colony. Whether it remains in the British Commonwealth or not, it is always going to be a “Westernised” country in which, tragically, the indigenous Australians are marginalised. You can compensate and offer sanctuaries and repatriation schemes but you can’t rewrite history.
Read this telling novel and reflect.
Next week on Susan’s Bookshelves: Orbital by Samantha Harvey
