Background (Wikipedia)
The Secret River was inspired by 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 inspiration to understand this came from 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 into Wiseman but not specifically about Wiseman himself. The novel took five years and twenty drafts to complete.
Background (Wikipedia)
The novel is dedicated to the Aboriginal people of Australia. Although sparking hostility from some historians such as the likes of an Australian academic, Mark McKenna, who published an article in which he criticized Kate Grenville, claiming that Grenville had referred to The Secret River as a "work of history," however, he could not provide a source for the statement.
It received a positive response from many Aboriginal people, Grenville has said "they recognise that the book is my act of acknowledgement, my way of saying: this is how I'm sorry".
Controversy surrounding The Secret River
After the publication of The Secret River, Kate Grenville found herself at the center of a public and highly personal debate about the role of writers in interpreting the nation's history. Australian academic Mark McKenna published an article in which he criticized novelists, and Grenville in particular, for trying to write history. He claimed that Grenville referred to The Secret River as a "work of history," although he could not provide a source for the statement. McKenna 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 from all sides. The historian Inga Clendinnen published an even more vitriolic attack in an article on Grenville in the Quarterly Essay (Issue 23), which was also notable for its failure to provide sources for its accusations.
Controversy Surrounding The Secret River
Grenville was forced to explain that she did not mean that she stood above the academic debate, just that she stood outside of it. She replied that she was an interested observer of the academic debate over the interpretation of Australia's history. 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 McKenna and the other historians who attacked her 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.
Controversy Surrounding The Secret River
The controversy gradually died down, but it left its mark on Grenville's reputation and Australia's literary discourse. McKenna and Clendinnen's inaccurate claim that Grenville believed she was writing history has been widely accepted as fact. However, Grenville has not surrendered to her critics, and she continues to write about Australia's history and the relationship of the white colonists with the Aborigines.
Historians on The Secret River (ABC, Feb. 13, 2013)
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 Prize.
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.
Author Kate Grenville originally set out to write a non-fiction account of the experiences of her ancestor Solomon Wiseman, an early settler on the river. But along the way she changed her story to historical fiction.
Historians on The Secret River (ABC, Feb. 13, 2013)
When the book was first published it sparked intense discussion among literary critics and academics about how novelists mix imagination with true historical events and characters in works of fiction.
Recently the novel has been adapted for the stage by Andrew Bovell for a Sydney Theatre Company production directed by Neil Armfield. The play has been brought to the Canberra as part of the Canberra Centenary's Collected Works program.
In the lead up to the play's premiere in Canberra, the Canberra Theatre Centre brought three historians together for a public discussion on the story.
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, is a post-doctoral fellow at the ANU's Australian Centre for Indigenous History. She 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 the white settlers and Aboriginal women.
Historians on The Secret River (ABC, Feb. 13, 2013)
"There's a more shadowy representation of a different possibility through [the character of] Blackwood and his relationship with an Aboriginal woman," she said. "But we don't get to learn her name . . . that alternative on the oppressive, sexual representations of indigenous people, particularly women, is not particularly interrupted there.
Dr Leane 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 since the Bicentenary 25 years ago there's been extraordinary interest in Australia's past.
"People have been wanting to experience this personally through family history research, genealogy," he said. "They've been wanting to link with convicts in their past, they've been wanting to link often with Aboriginal people in their past or, in many cases, both. Professor McGrath says the popularity of The Secret River is a reflection of the search for "our national DNA."
"I think that 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, " she said.
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"
From here the expression began to include, more generally, every quarrel on the interpretation of the past and of the history of a nation. Leaving the American shores the ‘History Wars’ have acquired an international status.
"History and Fiction: Kate Grenville explores the murky depths of Australia’s past in The Secret River" (Caterina Colomba in Academia)
It was Grenville’s statement that The Secret River represents a new form of historical writing which elicited the most bitter criticism from Australian historians. . . . [Her essay explores] that literary tendency to re-write and re-read in fictional terms those artificial ‘truths’ of history – raised to the rank of the official veracity in the process of the political genesis of the nation –, a literary tendency which has dwelled, in the last twenty years, upon some crucial moments in Australian colonial history.
In particular, the critical revision of the past has focused on the initial violent encounter with the Aboriginal peoples during the first period of colonization and on the role of penal forced residence assigned by the Empire to this southern region of its dominions; a role which was considered so defamatory as to be removed from the national consciousness in a kind of collective amnesia.
"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.
"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, by contrast, for the Europeans, represents an asset on which one could claim 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.
"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.
However, many historians such as Inga Clendinnen and John Hirst did not appreciate some of the statements which Grenville made shortly after its publication, speaking about a new way of ‘making history’; they refute the idea that a fiction writer can write a more penetrating and profound history than historians themselves.
"History and Fiction"
As affirmed by Mark McKenna in his essay entitled “Writing the Past”, one of the consequences of the History Wars has been that historians have become associated with political/partisan ideologies, in competition with one another in order to give weight to their own personal vision or interpretation of past events.
In doing so, historians seem to have lost credibility and part of their cultural authority in the eyes of the public who seem to consider novelists as the most authoritative and reliable guardians of the past.
That fiction can offer a deep, vivid and comprehensive understanding of the world and its past is not in question. The novels of Walter Scott and Balzac come to mind here.
The problem arises, however, when novels are read – or at least are expected to be read – as if they were history.
"History and Fiction"
The debate about the ‘truth’ of historical representation is almost as ancient as history itself. It is important, in this context, therefore, to point out that today the dividing line between fact and fiction has become obscured. More and more modern writers, however, underline that they base their novels on true events, original sources and detailed research.
In reality, even if a lot of the events described in the novel did, in fact, take place, they did not do so in the way, or in the place and time scale presented in the story.
For example she bases the events of the massacre at Hawkesbury River on a true event – the 1838 massacre at Waterloo Creek – but this is not the same thing as reporting history. The relationship of the writer with the sources, contrary to that of the historian, is not regulated by any binding rule and, in this context, reality can be freely manipulated.
"History and Fiction"
One of Grenville’s most inflammatory statements was made in a radio interview with Ramona Koval. When asked where she saw her novel in relation to the History Wars, the writer replied:
Mine would be up on a ladder, looking down on the history wars. I think the historians, and rightly so, have battled away about the details of exactly when and where and how many and how much, and they’ve got themselves into these polarised positions, and that’s fine, I think that’s what historians ought to be doing; constantly questioning the evidence and perhaps even each other.
But a novelist can stand up on a stepladder and look down at this, outside the fray, and say there is another way to understand it. . . . Look, this is a problem we really need, as a nation, to come to grips with. The historians are doing their thing, but let me as a novelist come to it in a different way, which is the way of empathy and imaginative understanding.
"History and Fiction"
Perhaps one tries to reshape the orthodox national myth because one is aware of its inadequacy.
Excavation into the past of the nation by so many writers of fictional history shows how the process aimed at defining Australian identity is still in fieri; therefore questioning and examining the past becomes an undeniable need for comprehension and critical reading of the present. In this sense the words of Michael Reynolds, young Australian writer, . . . Constitutes a warning:
The result, perhaps, is that we seem obsessed with these few, meagre stories. But until our artists, poets and writers have forged the uncreated conscience our race in the smithies of their souls, we have no choice but to depend on these few scraps of history.
From The Age, "Making a fiction of history"
At an early stage in her research for what became her novel The Secret River, Kate Grenville found a dispatch from Governor Arthur Phillip, written a few months after the First Fleet arrived in Sydney harbour. When travelling up the Hawkesbury River, he encountered an old Aboriginal man he'd met before, who greeted him with a dance and a song of joy.
The old man was caught out stealing a spade. Governor Phillip pushed him away and gave him "three slight slaps on the shoulder". The old man raised a spear, the Governor stood firm. Then the old man dropped his spear and left.
From The Age, "Making a fiction of history"
"I read this again and again, trying to make sense of it," Grenville writes in her book about the creation of her novel, Searching for the Secret River. "It was so sad and puzzling. Why was the old man so welcoming, why did he dance with joy? If he'd wanted to steal the spade, wouldn't he have been able to do it well enough to avoid being caught? Why didn't he spear Phillip?
"I could hear Phillip's voice, but I couldn't hear the old man's. I had a feeling he might have told the story differently."
Grenville never did attempt to tell the story from the old man's point of view, but she did use it in The Secret River. She shifted it 30 kilometres upriver, set it 25 years later and made the protagonist not Governor Phillip, but her fictional hero, the ex-convict settler William Thornhill.
And that was the start of her trouble with historians.
From The Age, "Making a fiction of history"
He had no plan, but found that he had pushed at the man's shoulder. It was warm and muscular. He slapped it lightly, and when he had slapped once, it seemed easy to go on doing it. He pointed to the spade and with each slap shouted No! No! No! right into his face.
The slaps on the man's skin were like slow ironic applause.
There has been plenty of applause for The Secret River, a microcosmic story of colonisation and Aboriginal dispossession, since it was published in 2005. Among its many awards were the Commonwealth Writers' Prize; the New South Wales Premier's Awards for Best Fiction and Best Book; the Fellowship of Australian Writers' Christina Stead Award; and the Nielsen BookData Booksellers Choice Award. It was also shortlisted for the Miles Franklin Award and the Man Booker Prize.
From The Age, "Making a fiction of history"
At the NSW Premier's Awards presentation, film director Neil Armfield spoke of the book as a key to understanding our past. "If you read Kate Grenville's great Secret River you understand . . . You can never see Sydney without feeling the memory that laps at the harbour's shores. Your sense of what connects the great mass of Australia to the past and to the world is profoundly, unforgettably enriched."
But some historians have not applauded The Secret River. In particular, they are unhappy with Grenville's reported claims at the time of publication that she was producing a new kind of history.
Melbourne historian Dr Inga Clendinnen says Grenville's version of the "three slight slaps" episode with the old man "had me walking around the room in fury".
She was incensed that Grenville had moved the episode geographically and in time. "The book's shape is made completely different by that kind of casual transposition. It makes the novel not only not history but, in my admittedly very austere view, anti-history.
From The Age, "Making a fiction of history"
"It's a dramatic imagination unleashed on some wilfully selected historical material, used as grist to the novelist's mill. I've nothing against novelists doing that. I just don't want them to say they are taking things into some zone beyond history."
Clendinnen elaborates on her argument in the latest Quarterly Essay, "The History Question: Who Owns the Past?" She disputes not only Grenville's "casual transpositions", but also questions her use of that time-honoured tool, the novelist's empathy
"We cannot post ourselves back in time," she writes. "People really did think differently then . . . How much 'culture' do we really share with British people of 200 years ago? Are we seduced into an illusion of understanding through the accident of a shared language?"
Questions for discussion
One of Grenville’s most inflammatory statements was made in a radio interview when asked where she saw her novel in relation to the History Wars. She replied:
Mine would be up on a ladder, looking down on the history wars. I think the historians, and rightly so, have battled away about the details of exactly when and where and how many and how much, and they’ve got themselves into these polarised positions, and that’s fine, I think that’s what historians ought to be doing; constantly questioning the evidence and perhaps even each other.
But a novelist can stand up on a stepladder and look down at this, outside the fray, and say there is another way to understand it. . . . Look, this is a problem we really need, as a nation, to come to grips with. The historians are doing their thing, but let me as a novelist come to it in a different way, which is the way of empathy and imaginative understanding.
What do you think of Grenville's statement?
Questions for discussion
Even among books that qualify as history, such as biographies of Thomas Jefferson, for example, different authors can produce quite different books.
In these books, it's generally considered a difference of perspective or interpretation. So how does that relate to this history war?
Questions for discussion
Admittedly, this debate has been ongoing in Australia, but do you think we could have a similar discussion in the U.S. about our national history and its depiction in literature?
Questions for discussion
Is this ultimately a debate about national identity and the interpretation of history in the formation of that national identity.
Is Walter Scott relevant here? Although considered the father of the historical novel for decades, his work has been more recently defined as historical romance.
Questions for discussion
We've read a number of novels based on history, including most recently The Rose Code.
Among Australian novels, we read Salt Creek and A Town like Alice, both of which included some history. In fact we talked about the difference between the original novel and the 1980's TV mini series based on A Town like Alice.
And then there's The Nightingale, by Kristin Hannah, The Alice Network, Kate Quinn's earlier work.
And what about Amy Stewart's Girl Waits with Gun?
And, add to the fray David McCullough's books, The Johnstown Flood, and The Pioneers, and Josephine Tey's The Daughter of Time about Richard III.
And of course, Shakespeare. If you learned your British history from his plays, you're misinformed.
Questions for discussion
Although we haven't as yet discussed The Secret River, I know that many of you have read other histories and historical novels. Can you give an example that might also fall into this "history war" debate?
Breakout room question
Where would you draw the line between history and historical fiction?
My "apologia"
Ironically, this debate between novelists and historians might be considered a "battle over turf" and the status of "ownership."
I prefer to consider it a clash of perspectives, which is also my point about the entry of women authors into the mystery genre. They use the mystery novel as a popular genre to explore issues of importance to them not included in more traditional, genre-specific literature. They add a perspective not recognized previously, as do authors from minority populations, other ethnicities.
Literature is crucial to the formation of national identities, or national "mythologies" as one writer put in. Writers have always influenced the perception of "truth," which these days we don't need to be reminded of.