The Secret River
by Kate Grenville
Overview
From the Publisher
The Orange Prize-winning author Kate Grenville recalls her family's history in an astounding novel about the pioneers of New South Wales. Already a best seller in Australia, The Secret River is the story of Grenville's ancestors, who wrested a new life from the alien terrain of Australia and its native people. London, 1806. William Thornhill, a Thames bargeman, is deported to the New South Wales colony in what would become Australia. In this new world of convicts and charlatans, Thornhill tries to pull his family into a position of power and comfort. When he rounds a bend in the Hawkesbury River and sees a gentle slope of land, he becomes determined to make the place his own. But, as uninhabited as the island appears, Australia is full of native people, and they do not take kindly to Thornhill's theft of their home.
The Secret River is the tale of Thornhill's deep love for his small corner of the new world, and his slow realization that if he wants to settle there, he must ally himself with the most despicable of the white settlers, and to keep his family safe, he must permit terrifying cruelty to come to innocent people.
My thoughts
First of all let me clear up any mystery about the categorization of this book. It is fiction ... however it's historical fiction, based on stories from ancestors and historical transcripts.
The book was terrific for the most part. It deals with a serious subject matter of Aboriginal treatment when convicts were shipped to Australia and sometimes it gets graphic, depressing, or touchy. Those parts were difficult for me to read. It seems to me the world is big enough for all of us to live in peace but I guess that's a naive thought.
Overall the story is a good read and certainly gives us something to think about. When I first started reading about their lives in London, I thought about Angela's Ashes, the book I recently read about growing up in poverty in Ireland. The stories really were very similar. Of course this one takes a different turn when the move to Australia takes place as a convict.
The book was recommended to me by my Australian friend John, and I am grateful to him for the recommendation. He knows how to pick books!
Favorite Passage
This passage takes place after the English decide that the Aboriginals should be rounded up and executed. It's a very tragic tale for all.
He said nothing to the Thornhills, keeping his chin up and his eyes elsewhere. Later his underlings, enjoying Sal's johnny-cakes after their time in the wilderness, spoke freely. It appeared that they had made the human chain, had proceeded, had done the pincer-movement and so on up the Valley of the Darkey Creek. After tremendous obstacles involving mud up to their waists, ridges and gullies in a series of walls, after every difficulty of snakes, spiders, leeches and mosquitoes, they had arrived at the cliffs, expecting to see the natives they had driven before them trapped there, cowering. There was not a single native, not so much as a dog. But dozens of spears had sailed out of the forest and trapped them, just the way they had hoped to trap the blacks.
They fired blindly into the bushes, but three redcoats lay dead, and four others wounded, before they were able to drive the blacks away.
