Secret River

Grenville Kate

Description

SHORTLISTED FOR THE MAN BOOKER PRIZE WINNER OF THE 2006 COMMONWEALTH WRITERS' PRIZELONGLISTED FOR THE IMPAC DUBLIN PRIZEA BBC2 BIG JUBILEE BETWEEN THE COVERS READLondon, 1806. William Thornhill, happily wedded to his childhood sweetheart Sal, is a waterman on the River Thames. Life is tough but bearable until William makes a mistake, a bad mistake for which he and his family are made to pay dearly. His sentence: to be transported to New South Wales for the term of his natural life. Soon Thornhill, a man no better or worse than most, has to make the most difficult decision of his life.

Sujets

• Historical fiction

Informations

• Publié par: Canongate Books
• Date de parution: 20 novembre 2008
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781847673534
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 3 Mo

Extrait

Kate Grenville 's bestselling novel The Secret River received the Commonwealth Writers' Prize, and was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize and the Miles Franklin Literary Award. The Idea of Perfection won the Orange Prize. Grenville's other novels include Sarah Thornhill, The Lieutenant, Lilian's Story, Dark Places and Joan Makes History .
ALSO BY KATE GRENVILLE
FICTION
Bearded Ladies Lilian's Story Dreamhouse Joan Makes History Dark Places The Idea of Perfection The Lieutenant Sarah Thornhill
NON-FICTION
The Writing Book Making Stories (With Sue Woolfe Writing from Start to Finish Searching for The Secret River One Life The Case Against Fragrance
Copyright

First published in Australia in 2005 by The Text Publishing Company
First published in Great Britain in 2006 by Canongate Books Ltd, 14 High Street, Edinburgh, EH1 1TE
This digital edition first published in 2008 by Canongate Books Ltd
Copyright © Kate Grenville, 2005
All rights reserved
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available on request from the British Library
ISBN 978 1 78211 887 9 eISBN 978 1 84767 3534
Grateful thanks to the Map Collection, State Library of Victoria, and the New South Wales Public Office for permission to use ‘An Outline Map of the Settlement of New South Wales, 1817’ by S.A. Perry
canongate.co.uk

This novel is dedicated to the Aboriginal people of Australia: past, present and future .
Contents

Introduction by Diana Athill

Strangers

PART ONE London

PART TWO Sydney

PART THREE A Clearing in the Forest

PART FOUR A Hundred Acres

PART FIVE Drawing a Line

PART SIX The Secret River Mr Thornhill’s Villa
INTRODUCTION
Grenville’s great-great-great grandfather Solomon Wiseman was aThames lighterman. Although he had risen from much humblerbeginnings, he was still one of London’s very poor, so stealing a few planksof timber from a load was not something shocking to him or his mates.But he was caught, and in 1805 was sentenced to be hanged. At the lastmoment he was reprieved and given the alternative sentence of transportationto Australia. His wife was sent with him as a free settler, notunusual at a time when there were few women in the colony, a problemto which sending out the wives of convicts was a cheap solution.
Convicts, once there, were put to work as slaves to people who hadserved their sentences and risen to be ‘settlers’. A man whose wife wasa free settler could be given to her as a slave, and that happened toWiseman. Tough and sensible, he made use of his skill at working withboats, and did well, getting his ticket of leave (a sort of parole) in 1810and his full pardon in 1812. He established his family on a piece offertile land on the Hawkesbury River,where he eventually built a fortresslikehouse, and became a citizen of consequence.
As a child, Kate Grenville was taken by her mother to see that house.Her mother was unusual in being proud of her convict ancestor, andpassed on to her daughter stories about him which the family hadpreserved. It was this, combined with a quick glimpse of what colonisationhad really meant to Australia’s original inhabitants, that causedGrenville to begin researching her family’s history with a view to writinga non-fiction book about it. The more she learned, however, the less shefelt she knew; until one day the novelist she truly is took over, and shedecided to free herself from her ancestor by changing his name. TheHawkesbury River was still there, with the house Wiseman had built, butnow it had been built and was inhabited by William Thornhill, and that inexplicable phenomenon, the novelist’s imagination, set about creatingsomething which her readers cannot fail to recognise as truth. Researchgives this book its rock-solid framework; imagination brings it alive.
It is possible for an English reader to feel indifferent to the idea ofa novel about Australia, particularly if it concerns the country’s relationshipwith its Aboriginal population. We have enough guilts of ourown, so we tend to package up other people’s, label them as deplorableand put them out of mind. We want novels to tell us about things towhich our nerves can respond, things we can see and smell, desire orflinch from, not just find interesting in a dutiful way. So it is importantto know that this novel is not ‘about Australia’. It is about a mancalled William Thornhill and his wife Sal, how they were plunged intoan experience so bizarre as to be almost inconceivable, what it did tothem and how they survived it. It would be an obtuse set of nervesthat failed to respond to their story.
Never again will dazed and filthy people emerge, after nine monthsin the stinking darkness of a ship’s hold, to see a rocky cove scatteredwith a few temporary-looking buildings, under a hammering sun, atthe edge of endless miles of monotonously grey-green bush. Neveragain will a pair with two children, one a baby, be issued with a coupleof blankets and a week’s victuals, given a floorless wattle-and-daub hutand told to get on with it. This ‘household’ was to support itself,makingno call on Government Stores: probably the most economical methodof dealing with felons ever devised. The Thornhills, who knew nothingof the world beyond a small area of London slum and a few miles ofa tidal river, might well have been undone by a situation demandingso much courage and resourcefulness. Some convicts survived by hookand some by crook (having the worst of one brought out by hardshipcan, and often did, result in survival), but the Thornhills were amongthose who were to discover an extraordinary amount of the best inthemselves – an unspectacular and everyday best, but it has to beadmired whatever subsequent actions they were driven into.
The central and most dramatic part of Grenville’s story comes fromthe nature of those subsequent actions, against which admiration hasto struggle. The boundless grey-green emptiness was not, of course,empty. Its inhabitants were good at fading into it when they neededto, but they were still there. In almost every respect their culture was the opposite of that of the colonists, and neither side knew the other’slanguage – though even if they had been able to communicate freely,it was unlikely that they could have collaborated. It was not just thatthe Aboriginal people were black and went naked while the colonistswere white and thought nakedness indecent. A much graver differencewas that the existence of the colonists depended on recognising ownership,while to the Aboriginal people that concept was foreign.
After William Thornhill found that he could make a living ferryinggoods between Sydney and the settlers who had established themselvesas farmers on the banks of the Hawkesbury, he saw that he could makean even better living by becoming a farmer himself. A white manacquired land just by choosing a patch, planting a crop on it and saying‘Mine’. There was no visible indication that it was owned by anyoneelse, and indeed it was not so owned in any sense understood by thewhite man. But it might well be a place where, in their season, yamdaisiesgrew plentifully, so when that season came round a tribe of theAboriginal people moved in to harvest them, being careful to leavepieces of root in the ground so the daisies would come back next year.They had been doing this for generation after generation, and ifsomeone came along, saw the yam daisies as weeds and rooted themup, the tribe would go hungry next season. Unless, of course, theyhelped themselves to the corn growing where the daisies once were,which seemed to them the natural thing to do. Food was not yours ormine, it was for people, so people ate it. This was the kind of misunderstandingthat made disaster inevitable.
The ways in which Grenville conveys the increasing tension betweenthe two communities are uncannily effective.When the Thornhills hadchosen their site they cleared a space and built a hut on it. The groundwas stony, the trees for posts were unequal in size, the sheets of barkfor roofing and walls were awkward to handle, so the hut was lopsidedand frail. By day the constant activity necessary for survival claimedattention to the point at which anxiety was pushed aside, but whennight fell and they huddled within their unreassuring shelter, listeningto the breathing of the bush, its rustles and creaks . . . Grenville soonhas her readers feeling almost as twitchy as the family. And even by day,the bush’s shifting shadows could suddenly look like a half concealedfigure – and sometimes were such a figure – which was extremely disturbing. And when a group of Aboriginal people did in fact materialise,and built its shelters and lit its fires only just out of sight, andbegan to move about its mysterious doings as though the Thornhillsdid not exist, the men carrying their efficient-looking spears, every nervehad to be strained in order to believe that they were not hostile.
Most of the few and scattered settlers failed to make that effort, andsome acted on their certainty of being threatened with horrifyingresults.William Thornhill, essentially a decent man, was sickened whenhe saw things of which one of his neighbours boasted, but he saidnothing about it to Sarah, so gradually he became complicit with theunspeakable, simply because – if he was to prevent his wife frompanicking, which would mean abandoning his precious piece of land– unspeakable was exactly what it was. He didn’t know it at first, buthe was being edged into a furtive undeclared war.
Kate Grenville, as a child, asked her mother what had happened tothe Aboriginal people when their ancestor started life as an Australian,and her mother said that by the time he got there they had all movedaway into the country’s interior. That, over the years, had become thecomfortable thing to be sure of. But her research brought Grenville faceto face with the truth, and it was not just awkward. It was hideous.There are times when i