
The Secret River
Secret River Trilogy Series : Book 1
By: Kate Grenville
Paperback | 3 May 2010 | Edition Number 1
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Product Description
- NSW Premier's Literary Awards, Christina Stead Prize and Community Relations Award
- Fellowship of Australian Writers' Christina Stead Award
- Literary Fiction Book of the Year and Book of the Year, Australian Book Industry Awards 2006
- Shortlisted, Miles Franklin
- Shortlisted, Man Booker Prize, 2006
In 1806 William Thornhill, a man of quick temper and deep feelings, is transported from the slums of London to New South Wales for the term of his natural life. With his wife Sal and their children he arrives in a harsh land he cannot understand.
But the colony can turn a convict into a free man. Eight years later Thornhill sails up the Hawkesbury to claim a hundred acres for himself.
Aboriginal people already live on that river. And other recent arrivals—Thomas Blackwood, Smasher Sullivan and Mrs Herring—are finding their own ways to respond to them.
Thornhill, a man neither better nor worse than most, soon has to make the most difficult choice of his life.
Inspired by research into her own family history, Kate Grenville vividly creates the reality of settler life, its longings, dangers and dilemmas. The Secret River is a brilliantly written book, a ground-breaking story about identity, belonging and ownership.
Praises for The Secret River
'When William Thornhill steps ashore in 1806, it's as if no one has described the scene before him. Such is the power of Grenville's imagination that everything seems newly minted.'
— Bulletin
'Fabulous historical fiction.'
— Australian
'A few sentences of Grenville's makes one realize that much of the writing one encounters in a novel these days is thin and perfunctory. Reading The Secret River may put you off anything less accomplished for a while.'
— Daily Express
'One of the most entertaining, accomplished, engaging novels written in this country...We always knew Kate Grenville was good but this one is brilliant.'
— Courier-Mail
'There is no doubt Grenville is one of our greatest writers... A book everyone should read. It is evocative, gracefully written, terrible and confronting. And it has resonance for every Australian.'
— Sunday Mail
About The Author
Kate Grenville's works include Lilian's Story, Dark Places, Joan Makes History, The Idea of Perfection (winner of the Orange Prize for Fiction), and The Secret River (winner of the Commonwealth Writers' Prize and the NSW Premier's Literary Award, and shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize).
From Kate Grenville's website:
The Secret River is part of a trilogy about early Australia (along with The Lieutenant, published in 2008, and a third novel in progress).
It's set in the early nineteenth century, on what was then the frontier: the Hawkesbury River, fifty miles beyond Sydney.
William Thornhill, an illiterate Thames bargeman and a man of quick temper but deep feelings, steals a load of timber and is transported to New South Wales in 1806. Like many of the convicts, he's pardoned within a few years and settles on the banks of the Hawkesbury River. Perhaps the Governor grants him the land or perhaps he just takes it - the Hawkesbury is at the extreme edge of settlement at that time and normal rules don't apply.
However he gets the land, it's prime riverfront acreage. It looks certain to make him rich.
There's just one problem with that land: it's already owned. It's been part of the territory of the Darug people for perhaps forty thousand years. They haven't left fences or roads or houses, but they live on that land and use it, just as surely as Thornhill's planning to do.
They aren't going to hand over their land without a fight. Spears may be primitive weapons, but settlers know that they can kill a man as surely as a ball of lead from a musket.
As he realises all this, Thornhill faces an impossible choice.
Some of his neighbours - Smasher Sullivan, Sagitty Birtles - regard the Darug as hardly human, savages with as little right to land as a dog. When the Darug object to being driven off, those settlers have no compunction in shooting or poisoning them.
Other neighbours make a different choice, and find ways to co-exist with the Darug. Blackwood has made a family among them. Mrs Herring "gives them when they ask".
Hostility between blacks and whites gradually escalates. Finally a group of settlers decides to go out and "settle" the Darug for once and for all. Will Thornhill join them?
The decision he makes is with him for the rest of his life.
The Secret River plunges the reader into the experience of frontier life. What was it like - moment to moment, day by day - to have been in that situation? It doesn't judge any of the characters or their actions, only invites the reader to ask the question, "What might I have done in that situation?"
The Lieutenant, the second book of the trilogy, is set two decades earlier, when the first colonists arrived in New South Wales. In many ways it's a mirror-image of The Secret River, taking up some of the same themes but arriving at a very different outcome (see elsewhere on this site for more details about The Lieutenant).
Searching for the Secret River is a memoir of the process of researching and writing The Secret River. It shows how events from the historical record were used in the novel, where they were changed, and the reasons for these choices. In drawing back the curtain on the process of writing fiction, it's also a useful and, I hope, reassuring account of the sometimes uncertain process of writing a work of fiction. (See more detail elsewhere on this site.)
The Secret River won the Commonwealth Prize for Literature; the Christina Stead Prize for Fiction (the NSW Premier's Prize); the Community Relations Commission Prize; the Booksellers' Choice Award; the Fellowship of Australian Writers Prize and the Publishing Industry Book of the Year Award.
It was shortlisted for the Miles Franklin Award and the Man Booker Prize and longlisted for the IMPAC Dublin prize.
As well as Australasia, it has been published in the UK, Canada and the US, and in translation in many European and Asian countries.
The Secret River: Extract
STRANGERS
The Alexander, with its cargo of convicts, had bucked over the face of the ocean for the better part of a year. Now it had fetched up at the end of the earth. There was no lock on the door of the hut where William Thornhill, transported for the term of his natural life in the Year of Our Lord eighteen hundred and six, was passing his first night in His Majesty's penal colony of New South Wales. There was hardly a door, barely a wall: only a flap of bark, a screen of sticks and mud. There was no need of lock, of door, of wall: this was a prison whose bars were ten thousand miles of water.
Thornhill's wife was sleeping sweet and peaceful against him, her hand still entwined in his. The child and the baby were asleep too, curled up together. Only Thornhill could not bring himself to close his eyes on this foreign darkness. Through the doorway of the hut he could feel the night, huge and damp, flowing in and bringing with it the sounds of its own life: tickings and creakings, small private rustlings, and beyond that the soughing of the forest, mile after mile.
When he got up and stepped out through the doorway there was no cry, no guard: only the huge living night. The air moved around him, full of rich dank smells. Trees stood tall over him. A breeze shivered through the leaves, then died, and left only the vast fact of the forest.
He was nothing more than a flea on the side of some enormous quiet creature.
Down the hill the settlement was hidden by the darkness. A dog barked in a tired way and stopped. From the bay where the Alexander was anchored there was a sense of restless water shifting in its bed of land and swelling up against the shore.
Above him in the sky was a thin moon and a scatter of stars as meaningless as spilt rice. There was no Pole Star, a friend to guide him on the Thames, no Bear that he had known all his life: only this foreign blaze, unreadable, indifferent.
All the many months in the Alexander, lying in the hammock which was all the territory he could claim in the world, listening to the sea slap against the side of the ship and trying to hear the voices of his own wife, his own children, in the noise from the women's quarters, he had been comforted by telling over the bends of his own Thames. The Isle of Dogs, the deep eddying pool of Rotherhithe, the sudden twist of the sky as the river swung around the corner to Lambeth: they were all as intimate to him as breathing. Daniel Ellison grunted in his hammock beside him, fighting even in his sleep, the women were silent beyond their bulkhead, and still in the eye of his mind he rounded bend after bend of that river .
Now, standing in the great sighing lung of this other place and feeling the dirt chill under his feet, he knew that life was gone. He might as well have swung at the end of the rope they had measured for him. This was a place, like death, from which men did not return. It was a sharp stab like a splinter under a nail: the pain of loss. He would die here under these alien stars, his bones rot in this cold earth.
He had not cried, not for thirty years, not since he was a hungry child too young to know that crying did not fill your belly. But now his throat was thickening, a press of despair behind his eyes forcing warm tears down his cheeks.
There were things worse than dying: life had taught him that. Being here in New South Wales might be one of them.
It seemed at first to be the tears welling, the way the darkness moved in front of him. It took a moment to understand that the stirring was a human, as black as the air itself. His skin swallowed the light and made him not quite real, something only imagined. His eyes were set so deeply into the skull that they were invisible, each in its cave of bone. The rock of his face shaped itself around the big mouth, the imposing nose, the folds of his cheeks. Without surprise, aas though he were dreaming, Thornhill saw the scars drawn on the man's chest, each a neat line raised and twisted, living against the skin.
He took a step towards Thornhill so that the parched starlight from the sky fell on his shoulders. He wore his nakedness like a cloak. Upright in his hand, the spear was part of him, an extension of his arm.
Clothed as he was, Thornhill felt naked as a maggot. The spear was tall and serious. To have evaded death at the end of the rope, only to go like this, his skin punctured and blood spilled beneath these chilly stars! And behind him, hardly hidden by that flap of bark, were those soft parcels of flesh: his wife and children.
Anger, that old familiar friend, came to his side. Damn your eyes be off, he shouted. Go to the devil! After so long as a felon, hunched under the threat of the lash, he felt himself expaning back into his full size. His voice was rough, full of power, his anger a solid warmth inside him.
He took a threatening step forward. Could make out chips of sharp stone in the end of the spear. It would not go through a man neat as a needle. It would rip its way in. Pulling it out would rip all over again. The thought fanned his rage. Be off! Empty though it was, he raised his hand against the man.
The mouth of the black man began to move itself around sounds. As he spoke he gestured with the spear so it came and went in the darkness. They were close enough to touch.
In the fluid rush of speech Thornhill suddenly heard words. Be off, the man was shouting. Be off! It was his own tone exactly.
This was a kind of madness, as if a dog were to bark in English.
Be off, be off! He was close enough now that he could see the man's eyes catching the light under their heavy brows, and the straight angry line of his mouth. His own words had all dried up, but he stood his ground.
He had died once, in a manner of speaking. He could die again. He had been stripped of everything already: he had only the dirt under his bare feet, his small grip on this unknown place. He had nothing but that, and those helpless sleeping humans in the hut behind him. He was not about to surrender them to any naked black man.
In the silence between them the breeze rattled through the leaves. He glanced back at where his wife and infants lay, and when he looked again the man was gone. The darkness in front of him whispered and shifted, but there was only the forest. It could hide a hundred black men with spears, a thousand, a whole continent full of men with spears and that grim line to their mouths.
He went quickly into the hut, stumbling against the doorway so that clods of daubed mud fell away from the wall. The hut offered no safety, just the idea of it, but he dragged the flap of bark into place. He stretched himself out on the dirt alongside his family, forcing himself to lie still. But every muscle was tensed, anticipating the shock in his neck or his belly, his hand going to the place, the cold moment of finding that unforgiving thing in his flesh.
ISBN: 9781921520341
ISBN-10: 1921520345
Published: 3rd May 2010
Format: Paperback
Language: English
Number of Pages: 352
Audience: General Adult
Publisher: Text Publishing Co
Country of Publication: AU
Edition Number: 1
Dimensions (cm): 19.8 x 12.9 x 2.2
Weight (kg): 19.9
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