Biography (from Wikipedia)
Catherine Elizabeth (Kate) Grenville was one of three children born to Kenneth Grenville Gee, a District Court judge and barrister, and Isobel Russell, a pharmacist.
She lives in Sydney with her son and daughter. Her leisure activities include learning to play the cello and performing in an amateur orchestra.
Biography (from her website)
I was born in 1950 and grew up in Sydney, Australia, earning an Arts degree from Sydney University. My first job was at Film Australia, editing documentary films.
Then I went to Europe and the US for five years, working and studying (I did an MA in Creative Writing at the University of Colorado).
When I came back home I worked for several years at the Special Broadcasting Service as an editor of subtitles, then became a freelance writer, reviewer and teacher of Creative Writing. Several grants from the Australia Council let me go on writing between those part-time jobs.
Biography
A version of The Secret River was the thesis for a Doctorate of Creative Arts from the University of Technology Sydney, and I’ve also been privileged to be granted honorary doctorates from Sydney University, Macquarie University and the University of NSW, and an award for Lifetime Achievement in Literature from the Australia Council. I was honoured to receive the Order of Australia in 2018.
I’ve been very fortunate to have been able to spend my life doing what I love. I’m very grateful to a world of readers who are interested in the same things I am.
Biography
I’ve been writing with a view to being published since I was sixteen – though it took me twelve years to see my first short story in print. Since then I’ve published sixteen books. Ten of them are fiction, three are books about the writing process, one is a biography (of my mother), one is a memoir (about the research and writing of The Secret River, my best-known book), and one of them is a science-y book about fragrance.
I’ve been lucky – many of these books have won prizes, three have been adapted for the screen, and one had sell-out runs at Adelaide and Edinburgh Festivals as a play. They’ve all been published around the world and all the novels have been translated into many languages.
About The Secret River (from her website)
The Secret River is set in the early nineteenth century, on what was then the frontier between British colonists and Australia’s indigenous people: the Hawkesbury River, fifty miles from Sydney.
Many of its details are based on my own family history. Like the character William Thornhill, my great-great-great grandfather Solomon Wiseman was an illiterate Thames bargeman who was transported to Australia in 1806 for stealing a load of timber. Within a few years he was pardoned, and “took up land”, as the euphemism goes, on the banks of the Hawkesbury. The land made him rich beyond anything he could have dreamed of in London. There was no going back.
About The Secret River (from her website)
I’ll probably never know how he dealt with the fact that he had taken – stolen – land that belonged to the indigenous people of the area. The documentary record is completely silent on that matter. But the work of historians makes it clear that there was violence between black and white on the Hawkesbury, even if Solomon Wiseman wasn’t part of it, and that was the story I had to try to tell. The story of one set of people taking over the territory of others is a universal one, and it can’t be evaded.
The Secret River caused controversy when it first appeared, and become a pawn in the “history wars” that continues to this day. How should a nation tell its foundation story, when that story involves the dispossession of other people? Is there a path between the “black armband” and the “white blindfold” versions of a history like ours?
About The Secret River (from her website)
The title is a quote from W. H. Stanner’s 1968 Boyer Lecture, where he says: “A secret river of blood runs through Australian history”. He’s referring, of course, to the often-brutal relationship between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians in the past.
From its tumultuous beginnings, The Secret River has enjoyed a long life. It won many prizes, has been translated into around twenty languages, has been adapted as an acclaimed TV mini-series, and had sell-out runs ( including at the Edinburgh and Adelaide Festivals) as a stage play adapted by Andrew Bovell.
Publications
Bearded Ladies (1984), her first book, is a collection of short stories about women trying to free themselves from the gender stereotypes of their society. It made her reputation. On its publication, Peter Carey wrote "Here is someone who can really write".
Publications—Singer Family Books
Lilian's Story, (1984)--her first published novel, is loosely based on the story of Bea Miles, known in Sydney for her eccentric public behaviour. Set in the early 20th century, its subject is a woman who rejects her middle-class background and the conventional future expected of her, and instead chooses to live as a street person, making a living by offering recitations from Shakespeare. At the end of her life she declares joyously: "Drive on, George. I am ready for whatever comes next." It won the Australian/Vogel Literary Award, has become one of Australia's best-loved novels, made into a film in 1996.
Joan Makes History, (1988)
Dark Places / Albion's Story, (1994)—retells the events of Lilian's Story from the point of view of Lilian's incestuous father. Won the Victorian Premier's Literary Award.
Publications—Thornhill Family Books—"Colonial Trilogy"
The Secret River, (2005)--won the Commonwealth Prize, the Christina Stead Award, and the NSW Premier's Community Relations Prize, was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize.
The Lieutenant, (2007)--the story of one of the earliest moments of black-white relationship in Australia, at the time of first settlement in 1788. Based on a historical source – the Gadigal-language notebooks of Lieutenant William Dawes – the novel tells the story of a unique friendship. In learning the Gadigal language from a young girl, Dawes wrote down word-for-word parts of their conversations. Grenville has used these fragments as the basis for a novel exploring how it might be possible for two people to reach across the gulfs of language and culture that separate them, and arrive at a relationship of mutual warmth and respect. She has described it as a "mirror-image" of The Secret River.
Sarah Thornhill, (2011)—sequel to The Secret River, tells the story of Thornhill's youngest daughter, can be read as a stand-alone.
Publications—Standalone Novels
Dreamhouse, (1987), made into film Traps in 1994
The Idea of Perfection, (1999)--won the Orange Prize for Fiction, at the time Britain's richest literary award.--About two people who seem the least likely in the world to fall in love. Douglas Cheeseman is an awkward engineer, the sort of divorced man you’d never look at twice. Harley Savage is a big, plain, abrasive woman who’s been through three husbands and doesn’t want another. Both of them bring all kinds of unhappy baggage to their meeting in the little town of Karakarook, New South Wales, population 1,374. (from her website)
A Room Made of Leaves, (2020)—about the life of Elizabeth Macarthur, a settler in early Australia. "What if Elizabeth Macarthur—wife of the notorious John Macarthur, wool baron in the earliest days of Sydney—had written a shockingly frank secret memoir? And what if novelist Kate Grenville had miraculously found and published it? That’s the starting point for A Room Made of Leaves, a playful dance of possibilities between the real and the invented." (from her website)
Publications—Non-fiction Books
Making Stories, (1993)
The Writing Book: A Workbook for Fiction Writers, (1993)
Writing from Start to Finish: A Six-Step Guide, (2001)
Searching for the Secret River, (2006)
One Life: My Mother's Story, (2015)—she uses the fragments of memoir that her mother left to construct the story of a woman whose life - in some ways typical of her times, in other ways remarkable - spanned a century of tumult and dramatic change.
The Case Against Fragrance, (2017)—about the politics and health effects of artificial scents
Cast of characters—William Thornhill
Born in 1777 into a large, impoverished family, he learns to steal as a boy in order to eat. Mr. Middleton rescues him by taking him on as an apprentice waterman on the Thames. Thornhill quickly learns the trade, loves the river, but not his higher class clients.
He loves Sal, Middleton's daughter, and they marry the day Thornhill completes his apprenticeship. They have six children during their marriage. When both the Middleton's die and the Thames freezes over, Thornhill loses his money, his boat, and the house they rent. He steals, out of necessity, but is caught with valuable Brazil wood belonging to Mr. Lucas. He is convicted and sentenced to death, but Lord Hawkesbury arranges for his transportation to New South Wales with Sal and Willie.
Cast of characters—William Thornhill
Although Thornhill initially finds New South Wales foreign and unwelcoming, he comes to appreciate it and find it beautiful. He falls in love with land on the Hawkesbury River when he begins working with Thomas Blackwood. After five years in New South Wales, Thornhill receives a full pardon and convinces Sal to move the family to the Hawkesbury to settle.
There, Thornhill comes into contact with the Aborigines. Although he fears them and thinks that they're uncivilized, he comes to realize that they live fulfilling, idyllic lives that strangely resemble the lives of the gentry in England.
Thornhill trades successfully with them, which earns him the scorn of his more violent neighbors like Smasher, who view the natives as uncivilized. Thornhill purchases a gun, thinking it will keep him safe.
Cast of characters—William Thornhill
He's persuaded to participate in the massacre at Blackwood's place after Sal threatens to leave: he loves his land too much and knows the only way to keep Sal and his land is to get rid of the natives. He's fundamentally changed after the massacre.
The book ends with Thornhill on the balcony of his massive stone villa, searching for Aborigines in the landscape with his telescope, haunted by his inability to understand or make peace with them.
Cast of characters—Sal Thornhill
They meet as children through Thornhill's sister Lizzie. Sal's parents spoil her because she's an only child, though she's haunted by her brothers and sisters who died not long after their birth.
She marries Thornhill the day he becomes a freeman, and the two have six children together over the course of their marriage. When Thornhill's luck begins to take a turn for the worse, Sal sets out to make the best of it: she begins stealing and finds her family cheaper and cheaper places to live.
She constructs Thornhill's story of innocence for his trial, and accompanies him when he's sent to New South Wales. Sal desperately wants to go home to London and keeps a roof tile from London to remind her of home. She sings songs and tells stories to her children about London, and Thornhill realizes that she does so to prepare them for their return to London.
Cast of characters—Sal Thornhill
In NSW, Sal and Thornhill begin keeping secrets from each other. He doesn't tell her they'll never go home and doesn't tell her the truth about Aborigines living over the hill.
On the Hawkesbury, Sal develops good relationships with the native women and trades with them for bowls and digging sticks. She doesn't like how Smasher talks about teaching the natives “lessons” using guns and whips. She makes Thornhill promise not to behave violently.
When she finds out about the natives' camp over the ridge, she insists they leave the Hawkesbury. Hoping to convince Sal to stay, Thornhill attempts to get rid of the natives by a brutal attack though he never tells Sal what happened.
She names their stone villa Cobham Hall after a place her mother worked, and tries to make it as English as possible in appearance. Although she never stops talking about London as home, she does come to realize that for her children's sake, home is in New South Wales.
Cast of characters—Thomas Blackwood
When Thornhill first meets Thomas Blackwood in London, he owns a lighter called the River Queen, which has a false bottom for stealing cargo. Thornhill runs into him later in New South Wales, where Blackwood is not only making his fortune honestly, he has also received a full pardon and owns land on the Hawkesbury River where he makes rum.
Blackwood is a quiet, private man who speaks in riddles when he speaks at all. He tells Thornhill that when dealing with the Aborigines, he has to remember that nothing is free: if a person takes something, they must be willing to give a little in return. Thornhill learns the extent of this when he goes to speak to Blackwood about the natives living on his own property and discovers that Blackwood lives on the very edge of his lagoon and doesn't venture into the forest because the natives told him to stay by the river.
Cast of characters—Thomas Blackwood
Thornhill also learns that Blackwood has an Aboriginal lover and the two have a child, and that Blackwood has learned the native language to communicate with them. Blackwood despises men like Smasher and Sagitty, who deal violently and cruelly with the natives. He avoids them whenever possible and eventually attacks Smasher for speaking violently about the natives. After the massacre, Thornhill’s second oldest son, Dick, goes to live with Blackwood and ferry rum up the river for him. Thornhill visits him occasionally after the massacre, but never sees the woman or Blackwood's child again.
Cast of characters—Smasher
One of the first men Thornhill meets on the Hawkesbury River, he's a small, mean man who burns oysters to make lime and breeds dogs that he trains to attack only Aborigines. He views the natives as little more than animals to be exterminated, and hunts them for sport. He often takes body parts from the native people he kills and carries them around as trophies.
Smasher despises Thornhill and Blackwood for attempting to coexist peacefully with the natives. He keeps a black woman chained up as a sex slave, and offers to let other men on the river use her as well. He loves telling stories of the trouble natives cause for white settlers, though he embellishes the stories to make them even more gruesome. Smasher is responsible for rallying the men to go to Blackwood's place and massacre a group of natives. In that battle, Whisker Harry spears Smasher, and Smasher dies as a result.
Cast of characters—Sagitty
One of Thornhill's neighbors on the Hawkesbury, he's great friends with Smasher and is similarly cruel to the Aborigines that live along the river, which he justifies because the natives steal from him regularly.
Smasher tells Thornhill that Sagitty joined him in raping the Aborigine woman that Smasher keeps chained in a hut. Sagitty is also responsible for poisoning the natives with rat poison at Darkey Creek.
On the day that Sal gives Thornhill an ultimatum about staying on the river, the natives burn Sagitty's hut and spear him in the stomach. Although Thornhill is able to get him to the hospital at Windsor, Sagitty dies.
Cast of characters—Dick
Thornhill and Sal's second child, he is born at Cape Town during their voyage to New South Wales. As a boy he's dreamy and solemn, and Thornhill doesn't recognize himself at all in Dick.
After the family moves to Thornhill Point, Dick regularly disappears to spend time playing with the native children. He learns to throw a spear and make fire, though Thornhill and Sal try to forbid him from wandering off after Bub tattles on him.
After Thornhill participates in the massacre and begins constructing Cobham Hall, Dick stops speaking to his father and moves down the river to live with Thomas Blackwood.
Thornhill realizes he's lost his son when he hears people speak about Dick as though he's Blackwood's son.
Cast of characters—Dan Oldfield
As a child in London, Dan plays with Thornhill and is a famous chestnut thief. As an adult he's sent to New South Wales several years after Thornhill, and Thornhill ends up taking him on as a convict servant.
At that point, Thornhill insists that Dan call him Mr. Thornhill instead of William to assert his dominance. On the Hawkesbury, Dan shows that he's cruel and fearful of the natives. He pushes Thornhill to participate in the massacre and encourages Thornhill to torture the natives like Sagitty and Smasher do.
Cast of characters—Ned
Ned is one of Thornhill's convict servants. He offers no last name and reminds Thornhill of Rob. Though he's not particularly skilled or useful in working Thornhill's land, he's surprisingly adept with guns. He's fearful of the Aborigines and suggests using violence against them.
Cast of characters—Loveday
A neighbor on the Hawkesbury, he too despises the natives like Smasher, Spider, and Sagitty. Claiming he was once speared in the hip by a native, Loveday spreads exaggerated stories of the natives’ violence and engages in cruel acts of retaliation against them. When Smasher brings a native’s head to Thornhill’s one night, Loveday suggests they pickle it.
Cast of characters—Mrs. Herring
She lives alone on the Hawkesbury River with only a few chickens. She smokes a pipe and is the closest thing to a doctor on the river. Though the natives steal from her, she turns a blind eye. She insists that she has enough and doesn't need to make a show of asserting her dominance.
Cast of characters—Whisker Harry
This is the name Sal and Thornhill give to the old Aboriginal man who lives on and around Thornhill Point. When they first meet, Thornhill slaps Harry on the chest and tells him "no," like a child.
Later, when Thornhill watches Harry dancing in the native camp one night, he realizes that Harry is an important figure in his community, worthy of respect, and that slapping him like he did was foolish and disrespectful.
At the massacre at Blackwood's place, Thornhill shoots Whisker Harry, killing him.
Questions for discussion
This novel begins with the chapter “Strangers,” set in 1806 when the Thornhills have just disembarked from the Alexander, the ship that brought them to New South Wales after a 9-month journey. It's their first night in this strange country and Thornhill encounters an aborigine man outside his hut.
Why does Grenville begin the novel with this out-of-sequence chapter?
Questions for discussion
Continuing this logical thread, why is this book structured around locations. After the first chapter, "Strangers,"
Part one is London
Part two is Sydney
Part three is A Clearing in the Forest
Part Four is A Hundred Acres, etc.
Questions for discussion
This novel contains a number of symbols; one is the green slippers worn by an upperclass lady travelling in Thornhill's ferry. He gives Sal a pair of green slippers at the end of the novel.
Questions for discussion
Another is the daisies that Thornhill dug up and discarded to plant his own corn patch:
The old man took a step towards the fire and from one of the bark dishes picked something up: a cluster of the daisy-roots, six or eight narrow tubers dangling from the stem. He pointed at the roots and spoke again. Finally he took a bite of one of them. Chewed, swallowed, nodded. Even with the words as meaningless to Thornhill as the cry of a bird, he understood. The man snapped off a finger of root and held it out to Thornhill. The flesh was translucent, glassy crisp-looking, something in the nature of a radish. But Thornhill did not intend to eat. Kind of you, old boy. That was a joke that had not lost its savour. But you can keep your radishes. He looked again at the thing on the man’s brown-seamed pink palm. Monkey food, I would call that, mate, but good luck to you.
Questions for discussion
The man was vehement now. He was explaining something in detail. He turned and pointed towards the river-flats, holding up the bundle of roots. There seemed to be a question in his voice now, a phrase repeated, as if he wanted agreement.
Yes, mate, Thornhill said. You can keep your monkey’s balls that you like so much.
The old man said something, something, loud and sharp, and Thornhill recognised the same phrase. He longed for words. It seemed that the old man was ready to wait all day for an answer.
We’ll stick to our victuals, mate, you stick to yours, Thornhill said. He met the man’s eyes and nodded. The old man gave a curt nod back. A conversation had taken place. There had been an inquiry and an answer. But what inquiry, which answer? They stared at each other, their words between them like a wall.
Questions for discussion
Yet another is Sal's tile:
But there was one thing she had brought from London that became more dear to her than any of those other objects because it was the one that remained to her: a broken piece of clay roof-tile that she had found in the sand by Pickle Herring Stairs the morning of her last day in London. It was worn and rounded from the tides of years, but the bulge along the edge could still be seen where the clay had been pushed into a straight line, and the hole where it had been tied on to the batten. The hole was not quite round, and its inner edge retainedthe grooves where a stick had been jabbed through the damp clay. I’ll take it back to Pickle Herring Stairs by and by, she said, rubbing her thumb over its smoothness. Right back where it come from. The thing was like a promise, that London was still there, on the other side of the world, and she would be there too one day.
Questions for discussion
What do these symbols represent?
From The Guardian, Book club reader responses
One of those who spoke of the "colonial guilt" that the book answered, wondered what responses the author had had from indigenous Australians. Grenville said that she had taken some care to measure the responses of such readers before publication, showing early drafts to a couple of indigenous friends who had pointed out some "shocking howlers". It was one of these readers who had told her about the yam daisies, grown by the Aboriginals as staple food and uprooted as weeds by the settlers when they planted corn. One of the key episodes in the story describes the Aboriginals helping themselves to Thornhill's painfully nurtured corn crop, taking it as a substitute for their own crop, which had been growing on the same land.
From The Guardian, Book club reader responses
For many of these readers, most of them enthusiasts for the novel, it was above all a story of a marriage, and the odd mixture of loyalty and mutual deceit that enables the Thornhills first of all to survive and then to prosper. One of Grenville's interesting confessions about the process of composition was that Sal, Thornhill's wife, had been a subsidiary and inert character until her editor encouraged her to give her the role she has in the final novel.
At the end of the novel, she is complicit in her husband's silence about what he has done. There was much discussion of this ending, which has Thornhill, after all his struggles, rewarded with wealth and domestic ease.
Questions for discussion
Because the novel is narrated through his perspective, William Thornhill is the most fully realized character in the novel, followed by his wife Sal. At third would be Blackwood, but the rest of the characters are not fully developed. They tend to be flat, static, representing an attitude or single attribute.
Why?
Breakout room question
We've read novels that have the characteristics of an epic this term, with Underground Railroad, and last time with Cold Mountain.
Does this novel have any epic characteristics, that is does it deal with issues larger than the individual experiencing them?
This novel is of course principally about the conflict between white convict English settlers and native Aborigines in Australia, but does is also contain larger themes?
Questions for discussion
The book's last chapter is "Mr. Thornhill's Place," known as Cobham Hall. What does it represent?
Although Thornhill has more than he could have dreamed possible by the end of the novel, why does he use a telescope to search for the figure of a man on the cliffs?
End of the novel
The description of the landscape, the changing light as dusk approaches, the shadows and colors that pass along the water and the cliffs is exquisitely done.
Watching the light on the cliffs was like watching the sea. Even after so long of living with them, their face was as unknowable as ever, new-formed each moment.
Through the glass he would study a spot where gold and grey made a particular sort of pattern. While he looked at it, he knew that combination of rock and shadow as well as he knew the face of his wife. But if he glanced away and then tried to find it again, the light fell in a different way and it was gone. . . .
Questions for discussion
At the battle on Blackwood's place, Thornhill shoots and kills Whisker Harry, and chops off his head. Why? What does this symbolize?