Grenville Herself

Why did Grenville write A Secret River?

In order to fully understand Grenville's novel, I think that it is important to hear directly from Kate Grenville herself and understand her intentions when writing The Secret River. Grenville explains in an interview that her family story was that her ancestors “took up land” in Australia and made a lot of money off of that land. For Grenville and her family, the myth that the land was there for the taking was clearly present. She then goes on to explain that because of this personal connection she has to this colonizing past, she felt it was an opportunity to tell “what reality lay behind that innocent phrase, ‘took up land’” (National Portrait Gallery 5:22). Greville keeps making the emphasis that she wants to tell what it “must have really been like, warts and all” (National Portrait Gallery 5:33). My point here is that she seems to really focus on telling a “real story”, which is a bit of an oxymoron. As addressed in the previous section, Grenville’s work is fiction, but it is being presented as reality which gives her sometimes dehumanizing potrale of the Aboriginal people a very harmful narrative. 

A Novelist's Place in History

Grenville has been confronted before about the accuracy of her novel, and her response caught many off guard. Grenville responds that she sees herself “up on a ladder, looking down on the history” (Nolan and Clarke 11). She explains that she, as a novelist, is not bogged down in details and is able to look at the situation from a different perspective because of it. On her website it is stated that she has never claimed The Secret River as history. This is why it is so complicated. Grenville has positioned herself around a controversial and important topic that is centered around history, claims to tell the “reality”, and then claims that she feels no obligation to be confined to the details of history. Even if unintentional, the work is presented as fact when it is fiction and therefore adding inaccuracy to the narrative of settler colonialism in Australia.

It is sounding more and more like The Secret River’s positive reception is due to the fact that it is her own, made-up story that allows “her sympathetic readers to reflect and engage in a ‘liberal fantasy’ founded in the belief that Australia's violent history could have been otherwise” (Nolan and Clarke 12). However, Grenville does not seem to have any negative intent as she states that she wanted to start a difficult dialogue to dispel the misconceptions about “taking up land” in Australia, and that her work could seed new work from others in order to get rid of the myth once and for all.

Sources:

Nolan, Marguerite, and Robert Clarke. “Reading The Secret River.” Journal of Commonwealth & Postcolonial Studies, vol. 17, no. 2, Fall 2011, pp. 9–25. EBSCOhost, search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=ssf&AN=73948252&site=eds-live.

National Portrait Gallery, https://www.portrait.gov.au/stories/kate-grenville. Accessed 19 Mar. 2023.