On Kate Grenville, politics and imagination

Kate Grenville and I go back years. Four years, to be precise. Not that she is aware of this.

Four years ago yesterday, the Northern Territory Emergency Response was announced by the Howard Government under the guise of moral righteousness. Four years ago on the same day, Alexis Wright won the Miles Franklin for her novel Carpentaria and used her acceptance speech to criticise the Intervention. Four years ago, I was halfway through my Honours degree as I listened to a lecture on creative writing about Indigenous Australia, and the lecturer discussed Grenville’s work.

At the time, it felt like everyone had been talking about The Secret River: an imaginative retelling of the story of Grenville’s ancestor, Solomon Wiseman, and his journey to Australia as a convict in the late 18th Century. It had become the subject of some feisty debate thanks to a 2006 Quarterly Essay by Inga Clendinnen discussing the discipline of history and its relationship to fiction, but also because of its depiction of Indigenous characters, which is where my lecturer dove in.

The Secret River (2005) is the first part of a trilogy about early colonial Australia. The novel traces the character William Thornhill’s journey from England to Australia, where he does his time as a convict before deciding to take land on the Hawkesbury River and make it his own. Crucial as they are to the plot, the Indigenous characters are still peripheral: the story is Thornhill’s, the crises are Thornhill’s, and the epiphanies are Thornhill’s too. But for Grenville as the author, the Indigenous characters were pivotal. As she discusses in Searching for the Secret River, it was the complete absence of any Indigenous people from the stories her family told about their ancestor’s arrival in Australia that encouraged her to write the novel in the first place. She responded to a personal political issue with an act of imagination – to engage with a historical reality through the art of fiction – and The Secret River is the result.

The second book in Grenville’s trilogy, The Lieutenant (2008), still focuses on the perspective of an English man, but it takes a step further by detailing the relationship between Daniel Rooke, an astronomer of the First Fleet, and a young Cadigal woman named Tagaran. The narrative is told from Rooke’s perspective, but Tagaran in particular is given a voice, has charm, humour, independence and a temper, and the Indigenous characters generally are given much more shape and personality.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, I find the most interesting thing about The Lieutenant to be the extensive use of Cadigal language and the reflections on the writing of fiction that are embedded in the narrative. Many of the issues Grenville came up against relating to colonial Australia and writing about Indigenous Australia were the catalysts for the research that would become the basis of my own PhD. And while my own fiction has moved in a much different direction, in the final frantic few months of thesis rewriting and revision, I’ve been going back through Grenville’s work and thinking over those questions that pushed me towards my project in the first place: what are the differences between fiction and other kinds of writing? What are you ‘allowed’ to do as a white writer writing about Indigenous Australia and what is considered bad form? Are there, or should there be, limits on fiction that falls into this political context? How does identity – and the political implications of identity – influence what fiction can do?

More than just meaty topics for academic discussion, those kinds of questions have become crucial to my negotiation of fiction and art in general. Australia is still a colony. The Intervention continues. The politics of Australian fiction is important. What we do with our imaginations influences what we do with our realities, so what do we do next?

Kate Grenville is currently working on the third book in her trilogy. She will be discussing The Secret River and her own reading habits as part of the 2011 MWF Schools’ Program.