1Australia, declared Australian poet Judith Wright in 1981, ‘is a haunted country.’2 The existential condition to which Wright was alluding, one much in evidence in her own writing, was the psychic discomfort many settler descendants experience at the nation’s failure to acknowledge—far less come to terms with—the lawlessness and violence of its early history. In the quarter century that has elapsed since Wright made her diagnosis, the trope of ghosts and haunting has become a commonplace in discussions of Australian identity. Yet, recognising that the national psyche is troubled in this way has not yet enabled settler Australians to lay their ghosts to rest. In contrast with the image Australia has successfully constructed of herself as a modern, laid-back, no-worries society, part of the population remains tormented by questions about its legitimacy, riven, as the so-called history wars attest, by bitterly conflicting accounts of its past, and incapable of achieving closure on the reconciliation process that was set in motion sixteen years ago.

2Kate Grenville’s The Secret River, an elegantly-written, meticulously-crafted and extremely readable novel, provides a classic example of white Australian anxiety and ambivalence over the nation’s origins. More significantly perhaps, and in direct contradiction with the author’s declarations about her book, The Secret River is paradigmatic both of the difficulty settler descendants have in facing some of the grim truths of colonial history, and of their consequent inability to exorcise the ghosts that haunt the national conscience.

3Briefly, the novel tells the story of William Thornhill, a Thames boatman who, in 1806 is transported with his wife and children to Australia for the term of his natural life. After obtaining a pardon, Thornhill takes up land on the Hawkesbury River which, in 1813, is still the home of the Darug people. Following a period of escalating hostilities between the Hawkesbury settlers and the area’s native inhabitants, Thornhill takes part in the massacre of an Aboriginal tribe. From that point on, his family’s lot in life steadily improves and Thornhill eventually becomes a prosperous local property-owner. At the end of the novel, however, he is a melancholic figure, obsessed by the disappearance of the Aborigines, and haunted by a feeling of great inner emptiness.

4In the many interviews Grenville gave when The Secret River was published to great acclaim in 2005, the novelist explained that her book was the result of a ‘huge amount’ of research she had carried out into the life of Solomon Wiseman, her own convict ancestor, and the model for Thornhill. Vouching for the authenticity of the historical data she had woven into the fabric of her novel, Grenville emphasised her ‘judgement neutral’ way of representing truths that had long been concealed in the cupboard of Australian history.3 In her opinion, the story she tells of frontier life on the Hawkesbury is ‘probably about as close as we are going to get to what it was actually like.’4

5Critical reviews of The Secret River integrate and reiterate the author’s point of view, underlining the ‘breathtaking precision’5 of the historical picture that Grenville reconstructs. Peter Temple’s assertion that ‘No truer piece of fiction has been written about the Australian past’6 is fairly representative of the kind of enthusiastic reception the novel has enjoyed.

6Grenville’s own memoir on the writing of her novel, published in 2006 under the title Searching for the Secret River, reinforces the author’s previous claims about the truth value of her award-winning work. It also constructs The Secret River as contributing towards the reconciliation process by tracing the genesis of the fiction to a real-life experience Grenville had during a march for reconciliation in May 2000. Describing how the momentary meeting of her gaze with that of an Aboriginal woman ‘sent a sudden blade of cold into [her] warm inner glow, ’7 she recounts how, for the first time in her life, knowing by what means her ancestor, Solomon Wiseman, ‘had persuaded’ (Grenville 2007: 13) Aboriginal people to leave the land on which he had settled becomes a matter of vital importance to her. Putting her own ancestor in the same time frame as the ancestor of the woman with whom she has just locked eyes is represented in the memoir as the spark that ignites her passion to investigate ‘what [Wiseman] might have done when he crossed paths with Aboriginal people’ (Grenville 2007: 13).

7Though it is a different choice of metaphor that Grenville uses to evoke the pivotal moment on the bridge, the emotionally destabilising impact of that ocular encounter when ‘everything swivelled: the country, the place, my sense of myself in it.’ (Grenville 2007: 13) has the hallmarks of a traumatic haunting.8 Indeed, the pertinence of Gelder and Jacobs’ assertion that the whole function of reconciliation is ‘to bring the nation into contact with the ghosts of its past’9 could hardly be more convincingly demonstrated. The sudden penetration of the author’s consciousness by a chilling sense of the link that ties Aboriginal dispossession to European colonisation is none other than the eruption of the ghostly colonial past into the postcolonial present. Correspondingly, the conclusion she draws—namely that the only way of dealing with such an experience is to confront the disquieting truth it points to—echoes the notion of exorcism that is so prevalent in a lot of reconciliation rhetoric.

8Resisting the powerful current of opinion—both the author’s and that of her reviewers—that reads The Secret River as an unflinchingly honest reconstruction of Australia’s brutal frontier history, this paper will argue that the ‘historical truth’ Grenville proposes is, in fact, a partial and doctored version of the colonial past. Which is not to insinuate that her novel performs the kind of crude whitewashing of Australian history exemplified by the polemical writings of chief history warrior Keith Windschuttle. Grenville’s is a much softer denialism, one that blurs the question of whether colonial Australia is guilty, as charged, of the larger crime of genocide, by focusing on the smaller details of an individual character’s ‘tragic’ involvement in a specific massacre. As in the history books that anthropologist W.E.H. Stanner refers to, what we see in The Secret River is, I want to suggest ‘a view from a window which has been carefully placed to exclude a whole quadrant of the landscape’10.

9One of the major paradoxes at the heart of Grenville’s project can be clearly identified in the author’s own commentary on her work where she seeks to prove the veracity of her claim to have produced a true and impartial account of frontier life by demonstrating how even-handed she has been in her representation of the conflict between Aborigines and settlers. A ‘gruelling scene’ of a white man dying a slow agonising death after having been speared by an Aborigine is, she points out, matched in the novel by ‘an equally horrible scene’ of a young Aboriginal boy dying as a result of eating flour that whites have deliberately poisoned. (Koval 2005) But it is a flawed logic on which Grenville relies here for, in a context where the ratio of human loss sustained by the two populations was characterised precisely by its terrible numerical asymmetry, the suggestion of an equally shared responsibility amounts, in effect, to a denial of the historical reality.

10As historian, Inge Clendinnen observes, David Collins, the colony’s first judge-advocate ‘knew where the blame lay, ’11 in the ‘chronic state of hostilities’12 that existed between settlers and Aborigines on the Hawkesbury, and made no attempt to pretend otherwise. ‘Whatever the settlers had suffered, ’ he wrote ‘was entirely brought on them by their own misconduct.’ (Clendinnen 2003: 258) From C.D. Rowley we learn that ‘Within the first decade of settlement on the Hawkesbury River, the Aboriginal came to be seen as a depredator and a pest...’13 Indeed, the sheer banality of genocidal behaviour on the frontier is clearly indicated in Rowley’s remarks on the infamous Myall Creek Massacre, which was, he says:

... one of a series, and seems to have been undertaken against quite inoffensive people as a routine matter; almost casually, twenty-eight people were taken from the hut of a friendly stockman, tied up with ropes, and slaughtered in the bush. ‘In order’ wrote the Monitor, 14 December 1838, ‘that their cattle might never more be ‘rushed’, it was resolved to exterminate the whole race of blacks in that quarter’. (Rowley 1974: 36. Italics added.)14

11In a recent article in Time, Jim Kohen, a specialist on the Hawkesbury Aborigines estimates the number of indigenes killed in frontier clashes between 1794 and 1800 to be almost ten times greater than that of European settlers.15

12The equilibrium conjured up by Grenville’s statement ‘Settlers were speared, Aboriginal people were shot’ (Grenville 2007: 115) is thus contested both by the historical record and by current research. Equally importantly, her suggestion that as a novelist, she ‘can stand on a stepladder, outside the fray, and look down at [the history wars], ’ (Koval 2005) without taking sides, does not bear scrutiny. If we examine two of the main fictional strategies adopted in the novel—the overwhelmingly sympathetic portrayal of a protagonist she has described elsewhere as ‘a representative white settler’16 and her choice of ‘third person subjective’ narration from that protagonist’s perspective—we cannot fail to perceive an attempt on the author’s part to orient the reader’s reception of the story. As she herself admits, ‘I didn’t want the reader to see him [the Wiseman character] from the outside in an abstract way. I wanted the reader to be right there with him.’ (Grenville 2007: 163. Italics added.)

13To begin with the first of those two points: not only does Grenville depict William Thornhill as having all the qualities and minor human failings of a decent man of conscience and integrity, the portrait she offers also incorporates two major and linked stereotypes— the victim and the battler— with which settler Australia traditionally identifies.

14In a minor, but nonetheless revealing, aside in her memoir, Grenville recounts how disappointed she is when her research establishes that her ancestor was not a Jew. ‘Part of my image of Wiseman, and of myself, ’ she informs us, ‘had always been coloured by the possibility of Jewishness.’ (Grenville 2007: 72) The only explanation Grenville offers for her feeling of disappointment is that suggested to her by an Aboriginal author to whom she confesses both her reaction to the news of Wiseman’s Gentile origins and her puzzlement at why she should feel that way. ‘If he was Jewish, ’ reasons Melissa Lucashenko, ‘that would make him just that much less white.’ (Grenville 2007: 73) A more plausible analysis, I want to suggest, is that Grenville’s wish for Jewish ancestry springs from the ‘deep desire’ that Anne Curthoys (among others) has identified in non-Indigenous Australians to see themselves as historical victims.17 If Wiseman had been Jewish then he (and his great-great-great granddaughter) would have belonged to a people who were the victims of a historically proven crime against humanity. As a non-Jew, Grenville’s great-great-great grandfather is a member of quite a different community—that of a people accused of perpetrating genocide.

15Grenville is thus obliged to find other bases on which to construct her protagonist’s victim status, a status that is immediately signalled in the scene with which her novel opens—notably, a close-up of the nightmarish conditions in which the Thornhills have been set down on their first night in New South Wales.

16Having hammered home the idea of the transported family’s immense vulnerability with a sustained volley of emotive images, the author follows through by staging a traumatic confrontation between the physically and psychologically defenceless Englishman and a grim-faced, unintelligible, spear-carrying savage. The entire episode can be read, I think, as a preliminary apologia for the settler’s later behaviour. For Thornhill’s eventual participation in the massacre of an Aboriginal tribe is, in many respects, the climax of a process that begins with the psychic charge exchanged between the two men in this initial adversarial encounter. Unprovoked aggression on the part of the indigene, prompting fear and indignation in the Englishman—these are the main constituents of the pattern of Aboriginal-settler relations that is established in the narrative as the Thornhills seek to develop their land on the Hawkesbury.

17If this five-page prelude to the novel foreshadows the dark drama towards which Thornhill’s insecurity inexorably propels him, the sixty-page chapter that follows focuses our attention on the exile’s sombre and equally insecure past. Most importantly, in the long flashback that punctiliously records the many and various ways in which William was victimised in England, the narration proleptically rehearses an explanation for his future involvement in what the reader will be primed to see as an act of desperation. Extreme poverty, the English class system and a ruthless justice that passes sentences of death or transportation on the perpetrators of minor, poverty-generated theft—this is the bleak and punitive social background from which Thornhill is shown to be trying to escape when he takes part in the extermination of natives who stand in the way of colonisation.

18In the remaining six chapters, chapters that recount Thornhill’s trials and tribulations as a settler and the growing psychological tension engendered by such hardships, the protagonist’s victim status is emphatically confirmed. Indeed, in a discursive manoeuvre that completely reverses the postcolonial understanding of Indigenous peoples as the victims of colonial expansionism, Grenville’s narrative repeatedly shows Aborigines encroaching upon the secure domestic space that the harassed settler is trying to create for his terrified and defenceless family.18

19Interestingly, we can find an echo here of manoeuvres deployed in popular, nineteenth-century representations of Native American-European relations on the American frontier. Referring to the ‘odd story of conquest’ proposed in the famous shows of Buffalo Bill, a story in which ‘everything is inverted, ’ Richard White observes that the spectacles produced by that singular frontier character:

... presented an account of Indian aggression and white defense, of Indian killers and white victims; of, in effect, badly abused conquerors. Such reenactments open a window onto a particularly interesting aspect of American iconography of the frontier. To achieve Joaquim Miller’s ‘kingdom won without the guilt/Of studied battle, ’ Americans had to transform conquerors into victims.19

20Returning to The Secret River, it is to be noted that the overdetermined victimhood of the novel’s main protagonist is in marked contrast to the scant attention afforded in the narration to the ways in which Aborigines were victimised by the colonial process. A useful insight into this paradox at the heart of Grenville’s work is offered by Ann Curthoys’ argument that ‘desire for the status of victim [makes] it extremely difficult for non-Indigenous Australians to recognise... the physical, cultural, and economic violence that settlers perpetrated against Indigenous people’ (Curthoys & Docker: 2002).

21On the obverse side of the victim stereotype is the iconic image of the battler, that legendary Australian icon who refuses to give in to the hostile forces life ranges against him. Interestingly, the family history passed down to Grenville refers to several battler ancestors, convicts who had ‘shown a bit of spirit, ... in trying to get something for themselves and their families.’ (Grenville 2007: 4) In her mother’s eyes, what is admirable about such men is that ‘They were survivors.’ (Id.) and she is duly proud of them. Grenville too, perhaps, is expressing a certain family pride in the ‘spirit’ of Wiseman through her fictional representation of him. Plucky, resourceful, willing to take risks, an indefatigable grafter who toils relentlessly to improve the quality of his family’s life, William Thornhill has all the attributes of the archetypal battler.

22The heavy emphasis Grenville accords to this aspect of her protagonist’s character cannot fail to remind us of Memmi’s observation ‘Rien ne pourrait mieux légitimer le privilège du colonisateur que son travail.’20 Faithful to the Lockean concept of land-ownership on which nineteenth-century justifications for white settler colonies were based, the ‘backbreaking labour’ Thornhill is shown to invest in clearing, digging, grubbing out bushes, planting seeds and growing crops is construed in the novel both as entitling him to legitimate possession of the land he has ‘taken up’, and as authorising the wealth such efforts eventually permit him to accumulate. ‘This is what he had worked for. He had lain awake planning, had burst his heart rowing and carrying and here it was...: the good life.’ (Grenville 2005: 330) In the economy of effort and reward which The Secret River celebrates, there is simply no place where the grievances of a dispossessed hunter-gatherer people can be exposed.

23Moving on to the question of narrative point of view: Grenville’s choice of third person omniscient narration, with Thornhill as focaliser, is justified by the author partly in terms of her inability ‘to understand or empathize... with a tribal Aboriginal person from 200 years ago, ’ (Koval 2005) but also, importantly, on the ethical grounds that stepping into the heads of Aboriginal characters constitutes ‘[the] kind of appropriation’ of which there has been too much in Australian writing. Mindful no doubt of the controversy surrounding Thomas Kenneally’s appropriation of an Aboriginal voice in The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith,21 Grenville makes clear that speaking from an Indigenous perspective is not a viable option for an author of white settler descent like herself (Grenville 2007: 193 & 198-9). It would be difficult to contest the legitimacy of either of the reasons she invokes.

24Nevertheless, while the use of a third person omniscient narrator is consonant with the aerial view of frontier history Grenville advocates—the stepladder perspective from which ‘the notion of one side being right and the other side being wrong becomes kind of irrelevant’ (Koval 2005)—her decision to make Thornhill the sole focaliser of the novel runs directly counter to the narrative’s capacity to deliver the kind of disinterested truth in which she claims to be interested.

25Filtered through the vision of the embattled settler, the picture we receive of the infinitely complex reality of settler-Aborigine relations becomes a simplistic and distorted one. Grenville’s decision to represent the colonial world exclusively through Thornhill’s eyes, and, consequently, via the kind of ideologically-freighted imagery that settler discourse calls into play22 thus effectively denies the reader access to any other view of Australia’s past.

26One example: explanations as to how Thornhill comes to own a stretch of ground on the Hawkesbury are, for instance, rehearsed both pro- and analeptically, in ways that serve to normalise British theft of Aboriginal territory. The intensely lyrical description of the emancipist’s first sighting of the grassy spit that will eventually become Thornhill’s Point both de-contextualises settler desire for land and aestheticizes such desire by constructing it as the result of visual rapture and a romantic love of place.

A chaos opened up inside him, a confusion of wanting. No one had ever spoken to him of how a man might fall in love with a piece of ground. No one had ever spoken of how there could be this teasing sparkle and dance of light among the trees, this calm clean space that invited feet to enter it. (Grenville 2005: 106. Italics added).23

27In this version of Australian settlement, the materialistic craving for real estate that drove colonial expansion has been made to disappear.

28In the absence of an Indigenous perspective, then, the monologic position from which the story of The Secret River is narrated permits only a limited understanding of what two of the Mabo judges referred to as ‘the darkest aspect of the history of this nation, ’ namely ‘the dispossession of Aborigines of most of their traditional lands.’24 Such a restricted point of view also prevents us from seeing the chain of cause and effect that has led to the abject conditions in which today’s landless Aborigines exist. To produce the ‘chilling, meticulous account of the sorrows and evils of colonialism’25 with which one admiring reviewer credited her, Grenville would have had to include in her narrative some reflection of the catastrophic damage inflicted on Aborigines when the territory they had occupied for millennia was taken from them. Instead, despite the author’s occasional attempts to break out of her unidimensional narration by offering us real insights into Aboriginal life, there is a resounding silence in The Secret River on the suffering of a people whose relationship with the land was famously described by Stanner in his 1968 Boyer Lectures.

No English words are good enough to give a sense of the links between an aboriginal group and its homeland. Our word ‘home’, warm and suggestive though it may be, does not match the aboriginal word that may mean ‘camp’, ‘hearth’, ‘country’, ‘everlasting home’, ‘totem place’, ‘life source’, ‘spirit centre’ and much else all in one.... When we took what we call ‘land’ we took what to them meant hearth, home, the source and locus of life, and everlastingness of spirit.... What I describe as ‘homelessness’ then, means that the Aborigines faced a kind of vertigo in living. They had no stable base of life, every personal affiliation was lamed; every group structure was put out of kilter; no social network had a point of fixture left. (Stanner 1969: 44-5)

29My final point is concerned with the ambivalence that, I contend, characterises the narration of the massacre. One important effect of the representational strategies discussed above is to diminish the full horror of the settlers’ extermination of an Aboriginal tribe. Firstly, because Thornhill’s function as the narrative’s main focaliser positions us to see what happens from his beleaguered perspective and, secondly, because the protagonist’s fundamentally sympathetic personality humanises the profoundly inhumane act in which he participates.

30I am not suggesting that decent men like Thornhill never participated in atrocities, but the historical evidence points to their not being typical of the kind of settlers who were responsible for the near-extinction of Aborigines. ‘Dispersals’ were carried out by men like the odious Smasher who keeps a pair of black ears in his pocket as a good luck charm, or sly Sagitty Birtles who uses arsenic-laced flour to teach the thieving natives a lesson. Both are characters in Grenville’s novel but they are represented as minor, peripheral figures—grotesques and misfits who are clearly not intended to be taken as examples of mainstream settler Australia in the way that Thornhill certainly is. Since, seen through Thornhill’s eyes Smasher and Sagitty are repulsive creatures to be contemptuously brushed aside, the reader has no means of gauging the relative importance such men actually had in determining the course of frontier history.

31Further evidence of Grenville’s ambivalence may be seen in a number of rhetorical and narrative strategies she uses to remove responsibility from her protagonist. In the build-up to the massacre, the idea that events have ‘pushed [Thornhill] into a corner from which there is no way out’ (Grenville 2005: 291) is reiterated in the text on several occasions. This idea is further reinforced by a series of metaphors that depict him as a man swept away against his will by forces he cannot control. ‘He had stepped on a great wheel that was spinning him away somewhere that he had never planned to go.’ (234) ‘His life was a skiff with no oar, caught on the tide.’ (291) At the scene of the crime, he is described as ‘a man in a dream, ’ (307) more a horrified, passive witness to the slaughter than a participant in it.

All over the clearing men fired and reloaded and swords rose and fell and came up all over blood in a din of screaming and roaring and the high panicked cries of children. After that first shot, things had moved too fast around Thornhill. He pointed his gun at blacks as they ran but the muzzle was always too late. He stood turning in the clearing, the thing up against his shoulder, watching.
(305. Italics added)

32And, most significantly, in an intertextual reprise of the famous murder scene in L’Étranger where ‘La gâchette a cédé, ’26 the single fatal shot Thornhill fires is construed as an agentless act. ‘The gun went off with a puff of blue smoke.’ (307)

33When relating ignominious episodes from the colonial past, the tendency of narrators, observes novelist Nicholas Jose, is to present ‘a heightened, apologetic, exculpatory’ account. ‘Few of us, ’ he notes ‘are capable of holding on to the undoctored truth.’27 And that, it seems to me, is the nub of the problem this paper has sought to expose.

34There is a moment in Searching for the Secret River when Grenville meets ‘the undoctored truth’ head-on. One day, she recounts, when taking down notes about white atrocities, a feeling of profound nausea overwhelms her. The last time she had felt this way was, ‘when, as a student, [she’d] accidentally come across a book full of pictures of people in the Nazi death camps.’ (Grenville 2007: 124) The crucial difference is that, unlike the earlier occasion, it is the sickening inhumanity of her ‘own people’ (125) that confronts her on the printed page. In the face of this traumatic truth, Grenville immediately goes into denial. She distances herself from the perpetrators ‘[they] were separated from me by time and culture, ’ relativises their brutality ‘ [they] grew up in a crueller world than my own, ’ rationalises their reactions by invoking ‘the logic of the situation... of newcomers moving into a place where other people were already living, ’ and reassures herself with the knowledge that there also existed another type of settler who developed ‘friendships with Aboriginal people.’ (125)

35It is my contention that what Grenville’s reaction reveals is ‘the paradox of traumatic experience’—a paradox that, as Cathy Caruth reminds us, derives from the fact ‘that the most direct seeing of a violent event may occur as an absolute inability to know it.’28 Which is why, in the end, The Secret River is only able to offer us an incomplete, fragmentary, selective and, at heart, feel-better version of settler history. Grenville’s intentions notwithstanding, the questions of Aboriginal dispossession and genocide remain unfinished business, spectres which will continue haunt settler Australia until, as the Aboriginal Chairman of the Reconciliation Council, Patrick Dodson, has warned, it owns the full truth of its past.29