Australian Literature

Characteristics of Australian Literature

Defining Australian literature has been problematic.
It's not a problem of identifying the origins of its authors; published writers who define themselves as Australian have their roots there.
It's a problem of defining its characteristics; as a national literature. What exactly identifies published work as Australian.
We'll begin with its history.

Australian literature—history

Although not all, but many, of the immigrants to Australia were convicts from Great Britain—England, Ireland, Scotland. This "convict past" has been a fundamental element of Australian history and an influence on its literature throughout.
Today the focus has changed; Australians now research their ancestral past, the origins of family. But in the early days, it was a point of shame and insecurity. What did it mean to be Australian if in fact you were a criminal transported there from a land you left behind?
That said, it's hardly surprising that the first fiction produced in this new country focused on crime and its consequences as a major theme,
The first novel produced in Australia was a crime novel, Quintus Servinton: A Tale by Henry Savery published in Hobart in 1830. Early popular works such as this one tended to be "ripping yarns" that told tales of derring-do against the new frontier of the Australian outback.

Australian literature—history

NOTE: The corollary in America were "dime novel," quickly written, "lurid pot-boilers" or pulp fiction published in the late 19th century that featured stories about the settlement of the western territories, with cowboys and Indians, ranchers, horse thieves, bank robbers, and the lawmen that curtailed them.
These early "convict" novels tended to focus either on the harshly convicted person who suffers under the judicial system, or the man who escapes and runs free. This man was the model for the mythic bushranger.
In the early days of the British settlement of Australia, bushrangers were escaped convicts who used the bush to hide from the authorities.
By the 1820s, the term had evolved to refer to those who took up "robbery under arms" as a way of life, using the bush as their base. Not surprisingly, these novels were, to quote one writer, "masculinist" and anti-authority, especially British.

Australian literature—history

NOTE: In America, we had Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. (There's a list of western gangs on Wikipedia)
In Australia, it was Edward "Ned" Kelly, an Australian bushranger, outlaw, gang leader and convicted police-murderer. One of the last bushrangers, he is known for wearing a suit of bulletproof armour during his final shootout with the police.
His story was made famous in a novel by Peter Carey, and persists.
And the Ned Kelly Awards are Australia's leading literary awards for crime writing in both the crime fiction and true crime genres, established in 1996 by the Crime Writers Association of Australia to reward excellence in the field of crime writing within Australia.

Australian literature—history

In a later variation, authors developed the "squatter thriller," with a rise in social class. A squatter is someone who settles on and exploits land, usually without payment to government or any consideration for the indigenous previous owners.
Note, at one point in Salt Creek, Rimmilli (Tull's mother) says that the land currently occupied by the Finch family was once inhabited by the native Coorong tribe.
Later, in 1851 when gold was discovered in New South Wales and shortly afterward in vast quantities in Victoria, the novel moved to gold mining which also brought many more free immigrants.
By this time, convict transportation was largely over in the east, with only seventeen years to go in West Australia. In this new world, women played a notable role in developing crime fiction set around the major goldfields of Victoria,.

Australian literature—history

In the 1880s, the crime novel focused on retrospective stories of the convict past. These portrayed the convicts as suffering from a brutal system imposed on the life of a wrongly convicted man of English origin, detailing his feelings, responses and final success.
Robbery Under Arms, first appearing as a serial in 1882–3, makes the hero a convict, but a fully Australian one, so the sympathetic criminal seems both normal and local, not an English import.
In Crimson Lake, author Candace Fox features a wrongly accused ex-cop turned detective and his partner, a convicted murderer, as her protagonists.

Australian literature—history

Other novels developed the "bush myth,” strongly promoted by the popular, and populist, Sydney magazine The Bulletin. City-based authors shaped stories around the brave, competent, democratic bushman, a figure who could be large and bold or as elusive as Arthur Upfield’s subtle-minded, half-indigenous “Bony,” Detective Inspector Napoleon "Bony" Bonaparte of the Queensland Police Force, a mixed-race indigenous Australian.
Upfield wrote a number of these novels, primarily in the 1930s; they were some of the first to include indigenous or First Nations people, although his Bony is largely British, the son of a British father and aboriginal Australian mother, born when an interracial relationship was forbidden. He has a B.A. degree from Queensland University. As a Detective Inspector, he applies his astounding tracking skills to crime investigation, and sometimes works undercover.

Australian literature—history

Although these novels are set in Australia, their models are the British and French "adventure" novels such as The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexander Dumas and Tom Jones by Henry Fielding.
NOTE, with Tom Jones, Fielding created this sub-genre at the very beginning of the novel as a genre. Even Don Quixote by Spanish author Miguel de Cervantes fits this category, and it's often considered the very first of the modern novels.
In later iterations, this adventure novel becomes the exploits of a national hero such as Sir Walter Scott's historical Scottish novels, including Waverly and Rob Roy. See also the works of another Scotsman Robert Louis Stevenson's, Treasure Island, or in America Huck Finn, by Mark Twain, or James Fenimore Cooper's The Deerslayer, Last of the Mohicans.

Australian literature—history

This genre has its origins in one of the earliest forms of the novel, the "picaresque"—Spanish for rogue or rascal—which originated in 1554. It depicts the adventures of a roguish, but "appealing hero," usually of low social class, who lives by his wits in a corrupt society.
Besides the heroic adventures, these novels are also notable for their "stirring ideals," personal moral values rather than legal statutes. The Australian novel has a consistent history of resistance to official authorities and legal institutions.
They also gave valuable insights into the penal colonies which helped form the country, as well as the early rural settlements.

Australian literature—history

Although historically only a small proportion of Australia's population have lived outside the major cities, many of its most distinctive stories and legends originate in the outback, in the drovers and squatters and people of the barren, dusty plains.
Much Australian writing focuses on the land and on people living in the bush, on rural farms or stations, in the outback, an environment bristling with life that can also be threatening and alienating. See Jane Harper's novels. But it is also beautiful and exotic.
This description of Australian life was unknown to many city dwellers; only recently have novelists focused their stories in an urban setting.
Note: it was the same here, that was the attraction of the "penny dreadfuls."

Australian literature—publishing history

Because they may have been embarrassed about their origins or because they were politically conservative, for a long while Australians ignored their own crime fiction.
But there was another factor as well.
For much of its history, Australian publishing was constricted by the British. Obviously the two countries had a longstanding trade relationship, maintained by a combination of cultural allegiances to Britain and international legislation. As a result, British companies dominated the publication of Australian novels, and publishing decisions were predominantly made overseas.
As a result, the large majority of Australian crime fiction novels were published in London, except when wartime made such trade impossible. In 1918, the International Market Agreement went into effect. As a result, some Australian writers moved to England and others used English or European settings.

Australian literature—publishing history

Around this time emerged the curious double structure of setting in Australian crime novels published in England. Apparently to please English readers, some novels had almost no setting at all, just announced they were from Sydney or Melbourne and proceeded through a bland location-free narrative.
Others, for more curious readers, were notably touristic, rich with bush or seaside detail. And it was strikingly common for the country itself to avenge the crime, with the villain dying in a flood or a bushfire, or from falling over a huge cliff.
A sub-set of the tourist thriller offered novels set in the islands north of Australia, which were at this time much visited by Australians on holidays.

Australian literature—publishing history

American publishers could not sell in Australia and listed it as a closed market, as were South Africa and New Zealand.
But, during the Second World War, publishing again became largely local. A notable encounter between history and crime fiction came from the large number of American servicemen, based in Australia visiting on leave from the Pacific.
With American publishers unable to sell in Australia under the imperial market-control system, popular houses sprang up, and issued paperbacks with lurid covers and fast-moving stories of crime, action and sexuality. The model was the American private eye, well downmarket from Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler, with the large majority by local authors but set in a vaguely realized America. The form remained popular for some time after the war.

Australian literature—publishing history

By the 1970s the field was dominated by psychothrillers with female authors, and Australian crime fiction was again being dominantly published in London—three-quarters of it in this period—without any publicity or reviewing of substance in the country.
This agreement did not end until 1976. In 1976 American publishers broke in court the long-standing agreement which had prevented them selling in Australia and other post-imperial locations.
At the same time Britain moved away from its former colonies to link with Europe, and the result was a new sense of, and capacity for, cultural independence in Australian fiction.

Australian literature—publishing history

Since then, there's been a surge in the publication of well-deserving authors and well-received works.
In the 1970s and 80s, cultural nationalist policies and broad social changes supported the growth of a vibrant local publishing industry. At the same time, the significant economic and logistical challenges of local publishing led to closures and mergers, and—along with the increasing globalization of publishing—enabled the entry of large, multinational enterprises into the market. This latter trend, and the processes of globalization and deregulation, has continued since the 1990s.

What defines Australian literature?

20th century Australian literature came next, ushered in by Miles Franklin’s My Brilliant Career in 1901—often touted as the ‘first authentic Australian novel’—and swiftly followed by Jeannie Gunn’s 1902 publication We of the Never Never.
Both texts explore the lives of pioneer women in the bush, and are often considered quintessentially Australian; realism had arrived in the outback. They also heralded in an increasingly reflective tone in Australian writing,
NOTE: one of Australia's literary prizes is the Miles Franklin award.
In 1973, Patrick White was the first of his countrymen to win the Nobel Prize in Literature, "for an epic and psychological narrative art which has introduced a new continent into literature," according to the citation. He was awarded the prize for a body of work, not for a particular literary effort.

What defines Australian literature?

Since Patrick White, other notable authors include:
Kate Grenville, The Secret River, for which she won the Commonwealth Prize and was shortlisted for the Booker Prize. Also Sarah Thornhill, A Room Full of Leaves
Richard Flanagan, The Narrow Road to the Deep North, 2014 Booker Prize. Described by sources as "one of the greatest living novelists" and "the finest Australian novelist of his generation." Flanagan is also an ambassador for the Indigenous Literacy Foundation, to which he donated his $40,000 prize money on winning the Australian Prime Minister's Literary Prize in 2014.
Tim Winton. Cloud Street, one of four novels for which he won the Miles Franklin Award.

What defines Australian literature?

From Rosalind Moran, "What makes a literature Australian"
Yet for all the diversity embodied by its authors, Australian writing—or at least, the writing which has come to define our literary canon—arguably revolves around a particular image of the country and its people.
From Philip Mead, "Nation, literature, location"
By far and away the strongest influence on its formation was the rage for nation that Europeans in Australia brought with them from the beginning.
This will to nation, driven more than anything by an unassuageable hunger for identity in possession of the land, was political, social, psychological and mythic.
It was also divided between an anxious sense of being displaced and inferior, and a confidence in being independent and distinctive.
It imposed a precise and exclusive alignment of unitary ethnicity, national territory and literary tradition.

What defines Australian literature?

Family struggles and the quest for identity are integral themes, and ones which have grown into central concepts in much Australian work, whether set in urban or rural locations. This is undoubtedly due, not least, to the complexity of the question: what is ‘Australian’? Where do you come from, and where do you belong?
On that note, it is worth pointing out the more sobering elements of numerous works falling within the Australian literary canon.
Disquiet is a defining feature of much Australian writing; after all, if one lives on this continent, it means that one has a family history which either includes leaving home and heritage behind at some point, inhabiting somebody else’s, or being forcibly evicted from one’s lands.

What defines Australian literature?

Furthermore, the settler’s unease when faced with the harsh, unpredictable Australian environment has translated into a common undertone for literature. The land and its habitations in these novels are practically characters in their own right.
To quote Holly Ringland, "landscape is destiny."
Yet the proliferation of Australian writing with these themes—the harsh land, the difficult lives, and the smattering of spirituality over a grim face—does not mean that these themes are Australian writing. Indeed, both writers and readers could do well to ask to what degree does Australian literature capture its subject, and to what degree are we cultivating our own culture through the stories we weave?
Naturally, culture is in part formed by storytelling, and there is no denying that this is very much the case in Australia, as evidenced by its literary history.
We live in one of the most multicultural and diverse nations on Earth. So what can you bring to Australian literature that’s fresh? Whose story are you writing?—Philip Mead

What defines Australian literature?

Perpetuating this particular tradition of Australian literature could also discount or overlook the stories of people such as Indigenous Australians or migrants of non-European descent, whose voices might not fit into the narrow, potentially exclusionary focus established by British settlers and their European literary heritage. Pride in our distinctive but contentious literary past could result in our peddling little more than one narrative. Moreover, the nation in this narrative might not even exist—and may never have done so.
For Aboriginal peoples in their traditional cultures, story, song, and legend served to define allegiances and relationships both to others and to the land that nurtured them. For modern Aboriginal people, written literature has been a way of both claiming a voice and articulating a sense of cohesion as a people faced with real threats to the continuance of their culture.

What defines Australian Literature—Britannica

The oral literature of Aboriginal peoples has an essentially ceremonial function. It supports the fundamental Aboriginal beliefs that what is given cannot be changed and that the past exists in an eternal present, and it serves to relate the individual and the landscape to the continuing spiritual influence of the Dreaming (or Dreamtime)—widely known as the Alcheringa (or Altjeringa), the term used by the Aboriginal peoples of central Australia—a mythological past in which the existing natural environment was shaped and humanized by ancestral beings.
While the recitation of the song cycles and narratives is to some extent prescribed, it also can incorporate new experience and thus remain applicable—both part of the past (called up by the Ancestors) and part of the present.

What defines Australian Literature—Britannica

Perhaps more so than in other countries, the literature of Australia characteristically expresses collective values. Even when the literature deals with the experiences of an individual, those experiences are very likely to be estimated in terms of the ordinary, the typical, the representative.
The white Australian community is united in part by its sense of having derived from foreign cultures, primarily that of England, and in part by its awareness of itself as a settler society with a continuing celebration of pioneer values and a deep attachment to the land.
The chief subject of Aboriginal narratives is the land. As Aboriginal people travel from place to place, they (either informally or ceremonially) name each place, telling of its creation and of its relation to the journeys of the Ancestors. This practice serves at least three significant purposes: it reinforces their knowledge of local geography—that is, the food routes, location of water holes, places of safety, places of danger, the region’s terrain, and so on—and it also serves a social function (sometimes bringing large clans together) and a religious or ritual function.

Salt Creek, Lucy Treloar

As genre, it's an historical novel, set during the 1850s and 1860s in Australia, and tangentially in England.
And like much of Australian literature, its setting is important, even crucial; more than a backdrop, it is a critical element in the novel, a character that is essential to the plot and theme of the novel.
Specifically, Salt Creek is set in the Coorong, western Australia, now a national park, but at that time home of the indigenous Ngarrindjeri (NU-ruhn-je-ree) people for thousands of years.
In the novel's central plot, Stanton Finch, with his family, attempts to cultivate this land, raise sheep, make cheese, all unsuccessfully, largely because he attempts to impose British agricultural practices on land unsuited for them.
Broadly speaking, this novel is about the imposition of the British perspective, not just to the natural world (plants and animals), but to social values, cultural norms, and religious beliefs.

Salt Creek, Lucy Treloar

It's a patriarchal system imposed on a land and a people not receptive to its dictates. Some members of the Finch family have a wider perspective about the relationship between whites and blacks, ownership of land, strict British rule. The narrow perspective fails and those who are more adaptable survive.
My breakout room question asked if this novel wasn't in fact an indictment of traditional British attitudes about gender roles, about race, about social class and culture, about religious beliefs, even about man's relationships to his environment, animal and plant life.
As an historical novel, this book also includes references to specific historical events to make its point. For example, it includes the story of entrepreneurs who believed oil was located in the Coorong and drilled Australia's first oil well in 1892. They were unsuccessful; the "oil" was in fact a flammable, compacted vegetable substance (known as 'coorongite').

Salt Creek, Lucy Treloar

Salt Creek, to prove its point, also includes elements of the "true crime" genre, popular in Australia, perhaps because of its "convict" past.
For example, one of the integral plot points involves the Travellers' Rest Inn, proprietors William and Catherine Robinson, and Malachi Martin and his murder victims.
Just before he turned 13, Martin was charged with theft while working at a post office in Encounter Bay. He was tried but found not guilty.
Six days later, his mother Mary died drowning in a pond near the family farm. Although witnesses had not questioned her state of mind, the inquest found that she had committed suicide “while laboring under temporary insanity" due to distress over her son's criminal trial. Her death was made even more tragic because she was heavily pregnant at the time.

Salt Creek, Lucy Treloar

Malachy (Malachi) Martin
- A few years later, Martin moved near the Coorong, working as a mail coach driver. While living in the area, he became friends with William and Catherine Robinson who ran the Traveller’s Rest; it was later believed that Catherine and Martin were having an affair.
- On June 14, 1856, William Robinson's body was discovered with his throat cut. Martin was a suspect, but never charged with his murder. Several weeks later, he moved to Sydney before returning to South Australia and marrying Catherine on June 23, 1858.
- In February 1862, a young woman named Jane Macmanamin, working at Traveller’s Rest, disappeared. Although Martin stated she had moved away on a whim, in April 1862, Jane's sister, who had stayed in contact with her, sent a letter to the Adelaide police, suspicious because she had not heard from Jane in some time.

Salt Creek, Lucy Treloar

Malachy (Malachi) Martin
- The Wellington police were investigating when on May 29 a Ngarrindjeri local, "Micky,“ told police that a fellow Ngarrindjeri (NU-ruhn-je-ree) named Itawanie had found Jane's body partially buried in a wombat hole about half a mile north of Martin's house.
- In June 1862, Martin was charged with her murder, tried, found guilty, and hanged at the Adelaide Gaol; he may have been Australia's first serial killer.

Salt Creek, Lucy Treloar

The Maria (ABC news)
- When the Maria, a passenger ship, foundered miles off the southeast coast in 1840, the story that followed became one of the darkest and most controversial events in South Australian maritime history.
- The crew and 26 passengers boarded the Irish-built brigantine Maria under Captain William Smith and left Port Adelaide on June 26, 1840, bound for Hobart. Neither they not the ship reached their destination.
- In late July, newspapers reported that "a massacre site" had been found along the Coorong coastline.
- Reports began to circulate that Maria passengers and crew had been murdered by natives after abandoning their foundering ship.
- A group of men set off from Adelaide to investigate and brought back horrible stories of finding "legs, arms and parts of bodies partially covered with sand and strewn in all directions," and described a trail of native footprints leading from the scene.

Salt Creek, Lucy Treloar

The Maria (ABC news)
- They also brought back wedding rings, allegedly found on the slain bodies of two female passengers, and said they had found local natives in possession of blankets and, tellingly, one wearing a sailor's jacket.
- A horrified public demanded action, Governor George Gawler sent a team on horseback to investigate, and instructed Major Thomas O'Halloran, leader of the expedition, to explain to the blacks "the nature of your conduct . . . and you will deliberately and formally cause sentence of death to be executed by shooting or hanging" when their guilt was determined. On August 25, two native men were hanged near the graves of their alleged victims.
- A huge outcry followed the hangings, with newspapers in Australia and overseas claiming the reaction had been disproportionate.

Salt Creek, Lucy Treloar

The Maria (ABC news)
- Late Ngarrindjeri elder Tom Trevorrow spoke about the Maria tragedy in 2003, saying the story was well known among his elders. That story said that sailors in the group "kept looking at the young girls, and kept trying to sexually interfere with them.“ It was not the way of the Ngarrindjeri(NU-ruhn-je-ree) people, and the sailors were sternly warned the offence was punishable by death under their law.
- It is believed sometime after the incident, a violent fight erupted, and the survivors of the Maria were all killed. Mr. Trevorrow said Ngarrindjeri people had carried out their law. "They would have had no idea of repercussions that were coming," he said.

Conclusions

So, in Salt Creek, we see:
- Interest in "true crime" stories, popular from the beginning of Australian literature, and still popular. We could speculate that Australia's origins sparked this interest.
- Strong conflict between British colonists and native tribes, with the British attempting to impose their standards and failing to recognize or acknowledge the cultures of the indigenous peoples.
- The environment is as much challenge as any individual, even more so.

Background Secret River (Wikipedia)

The Secret River started out as Grenville's desire to understand the history of her ancestor Solomon Wiseman, who settled on the Hawkesbury River at the area now known as Wisemans Ferry. Her research was triggered by her taking part in the 28 May 2000 Reconciliation Walk across Sydney Harbour Bridge during which she realised that she didn't know much about the early interactions between the settlers and the Aboriginal people.
Initially intended to be a work of non-fiction about Wiseman, the book eventually became a fictional work based on her research but not specifically about Wiseman himself. The novel took five years and twenty drafts to complete; ultimately she did write a non-fiction account of Wiseman's specific history.
The novel is dedicated to the Aboriginal people of Australia and received a positive response from many. Grenville has said "they recognise that the book is my act of acknowledgement, my way of saying: this is how I'm sorry".

Background Secret River (Wikipedia)

However, this novel sparked "the history wars," a debate about the role of writers in interpreting the nation's history.
Australian academic Mark McKenna published an article criticizing novelists, and Grenville in particular, for trying to write history. He singled out Grenville for her comment that she stood on a step ladder looking out over the academic wars on the interpretation of history. McKenna took this comment to mean that Grenville considered herself superior to academic historians, The national newspapers and media gave the issue wide coverage, and Grenville came under attack. Historian Inga Clendinnen published an even more vitriolic attack on Grenville in an article in the Quarterly Essay (Issue 23), which was also notable for its failure to provide sources for its accusations.
Grenville explained that she did not mean that she stood above the academic debate, just that she stood outside of it as an interested observer of the academic debate over the interpretation of Australia's history.

Controversy surrounding The Secret River

Grenville stated that she does not write history; she takes real events and weaves a story around them. She believes that historical novels give people who are not inclined to read historical tomes a chance to think about history.
Grenville believes that the academic historians were motivated by two factors: 1) They resent that the public pays more attention to novelists than to historians; 2) The 'publish or die' atmosphere that dominates academia pushes academics to seek out media attention to raise their profile and thus improve their chances of receiving funding for their work and for their universities.
The Secret River is a modern Australian classic—a critically acclaimed bestseller. It won the Commonwealth Writers' Prize and the NSW Premier's Award in 2006 and was shortlisted for the Miles Franklin and the Man Booker Prizes.

Historians on The Secret River (ABC, Feb. 13, 2013)

It's the most studied work of Australian fiction on the secondary school curriculum.
The Secret River is the fictional story of a London boatman called William Thornhill who's convicted of theft and transported with his young family to Sydney. They eventually settle along the Hawkesbury River but the land is already inhabited by the Dharug people. Thornhill's dream of a home for his family comes at a terrible cost.
When the book was adapted for the theater, Ann McGrath, Professor of History and Director of the Australian Centre for Indigenous History at the Australian National University, wrote the program notes for the play. She said there's nothing secret about the history of the early settlement of the Hawkesbury.

Historians on The Secret River (ABC, Feb. 13, 2013)

"It was written about by [Governor Lachlan] Macquarie, it was written about by the soldiers, it was written about by the First Fleet arrivals," she told the theatre audience. "It's very much in the documents and easy to see and I think this is a bit of a problem with the Australian, especially the white Australian, sensibility—that we think this history of Aboriginal/white conflict was somehow secret. Well it wasn't."
Dr. Jeanine Leane, a Wiradjuri woman and a post-doctoral fellow at the ANU's Australian Centre for Indigenous History, believes the story breaks some new ground in "settler fiction" but is disappointed it doesn't break more stereotypes, especially in the depiction of sexual relationships between white settlers and Aboriginal women.
She also ascribes the appeal of The Secret River to the way in which it gives a human face to the story of early white settlement and a deeper insight into the experiences of the indigenous people of the time.

Historians on The Secret River (ABC, Feb. 13, 2013)

Dr Martin Thomas, an Australian Research Council Future Fellow at the ANU School of History and an honorary associate professor at the University of Sydney, said that the popularity of The Secret River is a reflection of the search for "our national DNA."
" . . . there's this idea of the foundational narrative—our beginnings as a nation—and so Sydney or the Hawkesbury, they're very iconic places to focus on. . . . "

From "History and Fiction"

The expression ‘History Wars’ appears for the first time in the United States in 1994 when the Smithsonian Institute of Washington decided to put on an exhibition on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of the end of the Second World War.
There was a controversial debate on how to represent such a historical event. The organizers chose to exhibit the Enola Gay – the aeroplane which dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima – in a less celebrative and more ‘thoughtful’ way inviting the visitors themselves to judge the moral legitimacy of the use of this terrible weapon and, in so doing, they elicited a great deal of harsh criticism being accused of offending the honour of the nation.
Scholars, critics, historians, journalists and politicians publicly discussed what Jurgen Habermas had defined as one of the most controversial cases of ‘public use of history’, staging what was later to be called the ‘History Wars’.

From "History and Fiction"

Forging national mythologies has, therefore, always been an important creative moment for Australian writers. The need to establish a link between European roots and the native Aboriginal community, a more positive link than that offered by testimonies of dispossession and genocide, has become even stronger as a result of the awareness of the brutality perpetrated by whites on Australian Aborigines.
From here stems the desire to reveal a past that is ‘other’, to explore realities on the fringe of conventional accounts, to unhinge ‘imperialistic’ misappropriations of Australian history, restoring significance to ‘forgotten’ presences and facts.

From "History and Fiction"

What Kate Grenville seems to suggest is that the violence perpetrated on the indigenous peoples, at the moment of contact between colonizers and Aborigines, can be read as a consequence of a complete breakdown in communication.
The land, not only source of material life but also spiritual life for the Aboriginal people, represents for Europeans, by contrast, an asset that one could claim as an exclusive possession.
If, on the one hand, the native peoples are unable to understand the value and meaning of borders, fences and barriers erected by the whites as signs of ownership and control, on the other, in the perception of the white man the Aboriginal communities, mainly nomadic, had no sense of belonging to the place.

From "History and Fiction"

The collision between the two cultures is not, then, to be considered exclusively as a simple quarrel between rival groups which try to take possession of the same piece of land; it is, on the contrary, the result of a mutual narrow-mindedness, of a paralyzing incapacity to enter into contact with each other.
In the light of the dramatic and bloody crushing and the driving out of the indigenous peoples by the first colonizers, the novel offers a difficult and profound reflection on the way the continent was colonized.
In other words, Grenville provides a different perspective on this history and particularly a different perspective on the native aborigines, whose culture and values the original British colonizers did not see.