Ma Lu,Peng Qinglong

(Shanghai Jiao Tong University,Shanghai 200240)

Abstract:Through a detailed text examination,this paper contends that albeit Kate Grenville’s The Secret Riveris dedicated to interrogate white actions in the colonial past and expects to contribute to the process of reconciliation in Australia,it engages sympathy of readers through the empathetic personification of the protagonist William Thornhill,who is subtly positioned as a victim forced into morally dubious actions by extraordinary circumstances.The wrongdoing of the white settlers is normalized in a western conception of possessive logic,the plight of the Aborigines authentically diluted and minimized.This paper thus concludes that The Secret River is another white attempt to legitimize dispossession of the Indigenous and a failure of engagement in the national reconciliation process.This paper further points out that repressing the true history will never set Australia free;acknowledging collective guilt is the only way forward.

Key words:Empathetic personification; The Secret River;sympathy;Kate Grenville;colonization;dispossession

Ⅰ.Introduction

Kate Grenville was born in Sydney in 1950 and has been an Honorary Associate at the University of Sydney since the early 1990s.Grenville’s reputation as a short story writer was established by the publication in 1984 of her collection Bearded Ladies.She has also written several books which are extremely popular on creative writing,among which are The Writing Book,Writing from Start to Finish,and Making Stories.

Short-listed for several Australian and international literary prizes,and awarded the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize,the Christina Stead Award,and the NSW Premier’s Community Relations Prize, The Secret River (2006) is the first of Grenville’s books that takes Australia’s colonial past as well as relations with Australia’s Indigenous people as its subject.It has been described both as “a reworking of the narrative of settlement with a contemporary sensibility” (Kossew 9) and as “a most unpalatable and confronting depiction of whiteness as implicated in the massacre of Aboriginal people” (Kelada 2).

Typical of what Stella Clarke termed “novel as national confessional”,the book lends its title from the anthropologist W.E.H.Stanner,who wrote about a “secret river of blood flowing through Australia’s history”.It revisits mythologized accounts of pioneering triumphs on the frontier and explores a micro-history of colonization and dispossession to lay bare settler unbelonging,using the story of the author’s convict ancestor as a lens.It also touches upon the collision of cultures that occurred between the early colonists and Aboriginal people.In the commentary to date,attention has largely been paid to The Secret River’s use and abuse of history.During the Howard government (1996-2007),frontier violence became the subject of acrimonious ideological debate between historians of race relations and those who try to deny that Aboriginal dispossession had been violent.Several prominent historians involved in the heated public debates were John Hirst (2005,2006),Mark McKenna (2005,2005) and Inga Clendinnen (2006,2007).For instance,Hirst criticizes Grenville for a reliance on subjectivity and personal sentiment,rather than objectivity:“Worrying over the conquest;wishing it were peaceful;feeling that somehow it has to be rectified if settler Australia is to be at peace with itself:these are the products of the liberal imagination.Its decency knows no bounds or thought.”

In The Secret River,Grenville adopts a humanitarian critique of colonialism throughout the novel by producing an empathetic history of settlement.Grenville represents the novelist as trying to produce an empathetic history of settlement,but also trying to step back and allow the story of the place to appear.

The protagonist William Thornhill,deported from England to Australia in 1806 for stealing a load of timber,is personified as caught between his overwhelming need to reinvent himself in the colony and his compassion for Aboriginal people.Through a detailed examination of the writerly techniques,this article explores how particular personification Grenville structures in The Secret River to echo the fallibility of humanness in the character of Thornhill.In doing so this article argues that albeit Grenville’s texts are intended to interrogate white actions in the colonial past and contribute to the process of reconciliation,her empathetic personification of the white settlers undercuts that purpose as this sympathy inadvertently risks justifying the wrongdoing of the white settlers as well as eclipsing the suffering of the Indigenous peoples.It is my further aim to interrogate the implied moral equivalence that displaces contemporary settler guilt through this personification.

Ⅱ.Personification as the colonial victim in the empire

By portraying the protagonist as the “almost-innocent convict”(Collins 168) in the cruel eighteenth-century London who does not deserve the punishment imposed upon him, The Secret River engenders a sympathetic understanding of the background to the main protagonist’s journey even before arriving in Australia.Grenville sows the seed for all those descended from emancipists,that not all convicts were the same and even on the lowest rung of British society.As Eleanor Collins puts it:

One of the discomforts of The Secret River is the pressure of weighing the Thornhills’ considerable suffering in an unjust English class system against the Darug people’s unimaginable suffering in an unjust colonial racial system … there is a sense in the novel’s structure that one system of harshness and lack has led directly to the other.(169)

Grenville ensures that the reader is well informed about Thornhill’s life as a miserable boy born into extreme poverty,coldness,and hunger in the underclass of industrial London:“He was always hungry.That was a fact of life:the gnawing feeling in his belly,the flat taste in his mouth,the rage that there was never enough”( Secret 45).He is even rejected by his mother,who curses him for his hunger:“Greedy little bugger you were,she whispered at last,and he went away ashamed hearing his empty belly rumbling even then,and something in him going stony from the dislike in her voice” ( Secret 12).The protagonist grows up at the mercy of the pitiless English class system and is used to being so hungry that “he had eaten the bedbugs more than once” ( Secret 12),and so cold that he has to piss on his own feet to warm them.The family is too far down the English-class system to be able to get along by honest means,and Thornhill,concerned with staying alive,resorts to petty theft as a means of survival:“The dainty person could shrill all he liked about sin,but there could be no sin in thieving if it meant a full belly” ( Secret 16).His impoverished family life leaves him ashamed of the hunger that was a constant reality of his childhood.When he marries Sal,the daughter of a local waterman,he seems to have the chance for a decent life,but with the unexpected deaths of his parents-in-law,he is left indebted again.Due to sheer destitution,he resorts to theft again,eventually ending up before an Old Bailey judge,accused of stealing a boatload of timber.Initially condemned to death sentence,he is saved from the hangman’s rope by Sal,who maneuvers to get him a more lenient sentence of transportation to New South Wales.

The long biography of Thornhill by far accentuates the reason that drives him into crimes,which is his desperate struggle for a basic economic foothold;thus,his subsequent slide into the petty theft is conveniently understandable.There is a sense of misfortune after misfortune which is reminiscent of the innocent convict myth.The reader cannot but regret that Thornhill is hardened through the injustices of the penal system.At this point Grenville has already achieved her goal,for the reader is now too closely wrapped up in Thornhills’ tragic life to remain objective:the reader is more than capable of imagining that he or she would commit exactly the same theft in order to survive.This lays a solid foundation for a sense of compassion upon which the reader is able to understand his violent actions in the new land.Also,with the agony of Thornhill as a downtrodden colonial victim of the brutal and unfair British legal system,the plight of the Aborigines is diluted and minimized.By portraying Thornhill as victims and not perpetrators of colonization,with the non-settler English as the “real” colonizers,the novel constructs a fundamentally exculpatory explanation of frontier atrocities.In Thornhill’s case,when a family is in dire straits,one can accept this trivial criminal act of stealing timber.No one is actually harmed and it will save a family from starvation.One can easily put oneself in that same position when pondering about it.In this way,atrocities are projected onto the bad colonizers like Smasher Sullivan,Sagitty,Silk and the Imperial British army.Grenville then goes to a lot of trouble to rewrite and reinvent her ancestor in the colonial memory as a sensitive,reasonable man through the character of Thornhill and in doing so she appropriates an Aboriginal story.

Ⅲ.Personification as the vulnerable everyman in the colony

To aid in the formulation of an empathetic and imaginative view,Thornhill is morally placed somewhere in the middle as a vulnerable everyman type;hence the effects and implications of the atrocities may be somehow neutralized as they become more logical and contingent in these formulations.Grenville’s presentation of Thornhill’s actions is that of an Australian everyman,“a man who wasn’t altogether bad but did bad things”( Searching 188).The rendering of Thornhill as relatively a vulnerable everyman is achieved in a series of textual maneuvers which confront the preponderant well-meaning and unintentional “good colonizer” with encounters and clashes with the Aborigines.On the one hand,there is the“good colonizer” —Tom Blackwood — whose stated philosophy with the Aborigines is to “Give a little,take a little,that’s the only way”( Secret 107).On the other,there is the unambiguously rapacious character of Smasher Sullivan,whose chillingly cruel mistreatment of Aborigines includes mutilation,rape,and murder.However,Thornhill is positioned as forced into morally dubious actions by extraordinary circumstances.

Securing a pardon after five years in New South Wales,Thornhill travels up the Hawkesbury River to claim a parcel of allegedly uninhabited land where he sets about to wrest a home from the wilderness despite all the signs that point to the continuing presence of alternative owners.An example of the confrontation is in the opening chapter where Thornhill confronts an Aboriginal man with a spear outside his tent at night:

Be off,be off! … 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.(Secret 6)

Based on this baleful beginning,Thornhill’s maneuver after his transportation to Australia is basically characterized as a tale of one self-made man with resourcefulness,courage,and purpose carving out a new ground against odds and difficulties.Unlike the evil colonizers,Thornhill has no murderous intent to hurt the Aborigines.After he witnesses Smasher’s barbaric treatment of the Aboriginal woman he holds captive,chained by the ankles to sexually abuse her,and hears graphic sadistic details of the offences inflicted upon her,there is a space for a moral response:“a black woman,cringing against the wall,panting so he could see the teeth gleaming in her pained mouth,and the sores where the chain had chafed,red jewels against her black” ( Secret 262).Thornhill is repelled and shamed by the invitation of Smasher to rape the Aboriginal woman:“saying the words would make him the same as Smasher.… He had done nothing to help her.Now the evil was part of him” ( Secret 264).By denying the memory of the incident Thornhill hopes to absolve himself from guilt.Thornhill sets out to adopt a coexistence attitude towards the Aborigines.He even admires their way of living,so strong that he once goes as far as to compare them with the English gentry,with the only difference being that they are rather more egalitarian:

They spent a little time each day on their business,but the rest was their own to enjoy.The difference was that in their universe there was no call for another class of folk who stood to wait up to their thighs in river-water for them to finish their chat so they could be taken to their play or their lady-friend.(Secret 230)

Thornhill’s encounter with the Aboriginal boy after he comes upon a camp where all the inhabitants have been poisoned with damper is an example of the author’s further attempt to reassure readers that he belongs to the everyman type who has enough conscience and humanity.Initially,Thornhill says to the boy “Ain’t nothing I can do for you”,then the author reveals that he wants to “turn his back;leave all this”( Secret 277).However,his sense of compassion wins out at the final moment:“somehow he could not.He would give the boy water.He could at least offer that gesture.Then he could leave”( Secret 277).In this novel,settler and Aboriginal acts of violence stem from Grenville’s foregrounding of the idea that one event came after another,“no one understood what the other side was thinking,and at the end,there was bad trouble.It was never a simple matter of right and wrong” ( Searching 132).Perhaps it is impossible to evoke sympathy for convict psychology in fiction without softening the responsibility for violence in a novel with first contact as its focus point.

Although he feels justified in defending his crop with physical force against Indigenous women who are stealing it,he lets go the boy who is caught instead of using him to lure more Aboriginal people because he reminds him of the poisoned boy ( Secret 282).It is clear that Thornhill,while capable of acting violently in a justified manner here,is also compassionate and has a tender mind.Thornhill’s innate goodness makes him a particularly effective conduit for contemporary reader identification to assuage anxiety.

An important feature of the novel is its clear articulation of Thornhill’s amorous relationship to the land.It is absolutely impossible to miss the significance of land to this novel,the “most familiar of Australian representational tropes” (Schaffer 50).Thornhill’s aspirations to property and prosperity are impossible to satisfy back in England.He wishes to move beyond his past agonies and attain access to the comforts that have been available only to the upperclasses in England.In the colony,this drive takes the form of the land that he desires so terribly on the Hawkesbury River.When he first encounters the piece of ground upon the Hawkesbury River,an obsession to own it drives him.He has never owned anything and so this “aching” desire,which he would murder to fulfill,is conveniently normalized in the western conception of a possessive logic.Thornhill is so consumed by the pull of the land of the Hawkesbury from his first encounter with it:

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.He let himself imagine it:standing on the crest of that slope,looking down over his own place:Thornhill’s Point.It was a piercing hunger in his guts:to own it.To say mine,in a way he had never been able to say mine of anything at all.He had not known until this minute that it was something he wanted so much.(Secret 110)

For the first time in Thornhill’s life,he feels that he fits there,that this new country can be his new home filled with fresh opportunities that he could never have dreamed of.Possession of the land has developed a heavily symbolic meaning for him whereby he displaces his earlier desire for validation as a worthy human onto the land.Grenville thus depicts settler claims to land on equivalent terms to Aboriginal claims.This can also be read as a kind of neutrality towards both parties of the frontier.

Emphasis is placed on Thornhill’s sentimentality towards the land,which can be regarded as an attempt to legitimize the national identity constructed on the dispossession of the Indigenous people:“This sky,those cliffs,that river were no longer the means by which he might return to some other place.This was where he was:not just in body,but in the soul as well” ( Secret 289).This desire is even consistently conceived in hyper sexualized imagery of compulsive possession.In the boat “Hope”,Thornhill winds his way “into the very body of the land” ( Secret 129).Thornhill feels an almost sexual passion for the land he claims:“he could not forget the quiet ground beyond the screen of reeds and mangroves and the gentle swelling of that point,as sweet as a woman’s body” ( Secret 125).His love for Sal is displaced by his love of the land,so much so that when they quarrel “she did not recognize him.Some violent man was pulling at her,shouting at her,the stranger within the heart of her husband” ( Secret 303).

However,what Thornhill fails to realize is that he is not the legitimate owner of the land he calls Thornhill’s Point.The territory he regards as “the emptiest place in the world,too wild for any man to have made it his home” ( Secret 101) is,in fact,inhabited by the Darug people.Grenville uses “yam daisies” — an Indigenous food crop of the Hawkesbury River banks — as a metonymy for Aboriginal possession in the novel.Upon the arrival of the settlers,the yam daisies are removed as weeds and replaced by Thornhill’s family with corn.In turn,this corn is harvested by local Aboriginal people ( Secret 279).

In this fictional version of the scenario,there was not necessarily animosity between settlers and Indigenous originally,but numerous misunderstandings piled up into hostilities and confrontations over the usage of land which will lead to the final massacre.Thornhill is a proxy for exploring what one might do in that given situation.Such constructions and historic juxtapositions can act as rationalizations that effectively create a softening of Thornhill’s accountability in the coming massacre.

Ⅳ.Personification as the passive bystander amid the massacre

The protagonist,complicit in the murder of Indigenous families at their campsite,whose actions can be argued to constitute part of a larger picture of colonization,was presented as not proficient at the bloody deeds.Thornhill’s image as a worthy character who stands up and fights in such terms as “everyone trying to decide what to do” is to suggest that there are two parties in a relationship who have had irreconcilable differences and failed communication.

Thornhill attempts to communicate with his Aboriginal neighbors,but his tolerance gradually comes to an end with their intermittent burning of his corn patch.New South Wales had become “a machine in which some men would be crushed up and spat out,and others would rise to heights they would not have dreamed of before” ( Secret 182).Tensions with Aborigines whose land has been increasingly encroached upon from white settlement build before the pervasive undercurrent of violence erupts in a planned massacre.The choices confronting Thornhill are reduced to either complying with his wife’s ultimatum to leave the dreamland or aligning himself with the other emancipist settlers to form a murdering collective to annihilate the Darug people,as Dan echoes:“Get rid of the blacks and she will stay,Will … Ain’t no other way to hold her…” ( Secret 298).When Smasher first mentions the idea of attacking the camp at Blackwood’s:“Thornhill felt something in him slow down” ( Secret 297),the atmosphere is overpowering:“The men closed in around him and there was a sound of agreement from many throats.It was not the voice of any one man but the voice of the group,faceless and powerful” ( Secret 297).He allows himself to be a part of the “mood in the room that was becoming wicked” ( Secret 298).

His paralysis and ineptitude make it potentially easier for the reader to digest his participation in the massacre:“by and large,he had never considered them to be bad men.And yet their lives,like his,had somehow brought them to this:waiting for the tide to turn,so they could go and do what only the worst of men would do” ( Secret 300).

Grenville obviously writes The Secret River from her own cushioned perspective of the past,rather than from a realistic nineteenth-century perspective.Even when Thornhill participates in the mass slaughter,Grenville opts not to let her protagonist be fully involved in violent acts.She finds a rationale for Thornhill by normalizing him as a “gentleman” who is “decent” in his impulses.He cannot shoot initially,standing in passivity amidst gunshots and spears flying around him：

Then Whisker Harry,wily and fragile,calmly stepped out from them.Thornhill could see his arm trembling as he fitted the spear into the thrower and got it up to his shoulder.His face contorted with effort as he leaned his body back to launch the spear.The gun was still up at Thornhill’s shoulder,his finger was against the trigger,but he could not move,a man in a dream.He was aware of issuing orders to his fingers to pull back on the trigger,but nothing happened (Secret 300).

Thornhill appears plagued by a lack of competency:things “moved too fast”,the muzzle was “always too late”,he literally drops the gun then is “too show”;only on one occasion does Grenville admit Thornhill’s full complicity.Thornhill has hedged himself into a predicament where his prior alignments make it almost impossible for him to do otherwise.The one Aboriginal man Thornhill kills in spite of himself it seems,is Whisker Harry.After Smasher is speared he pleads with Thornhill to retaliate:“Smasher was rasping as if the wood in his chest had got his voice:Jesus Christ Almighty,Jesus Christ Almighty”( Secret 307).Through contextual framework to form the empathetic bond with the readers,Grenville presents Thornhill as almost a passive bystander being reluctantly carried along by contagion and circumstance,his participation in the massacre as a contingent act in defense of his home and family:

The gun went off with a puff of blue smoke and a pop that sounded puny in all this air.He thought he must have missed,for Whisker Harry was still standing there with that look on his face as if nothing could touch him.The old man bent slowly forward until he was on his knees,holding his belly.It seemed the longest time that he stayed like that as if by becoming a rock or a tree he could eject the thing that entered him.(Secret 307-308)

While the white protagonist is present on site,he is not acting the part of brutal murderer.For John Hirst,this is a “liberal fantasy view” of history,one to which,he says,Grenville subscribes unquestioningly,and which propounds that the conflict between settlers and Aborigines need not have been so brutal and final in its outcome.This liberal fantasy standpoint relies,Hirst argues,on an unrealistic claim to humanity’s decency,and on an unrealistic attempt to project oneself back into the past.His involvement represents “not a considered attitude to Aboriginal people,just a pragmatic response to a problem”( Searching 189),which lessens the degree of his culpability.As Probyn Rapsley (2007) have claimed,the empathy and understanding that the novel often shows towards its protagonist indirectly endorse Aboriginal genocide and dispossession.The most ordinary human beings are capable of the most inhuman acts when caught up in a particular set of circumstances:the powerful drive of self-protection and survival,the sense of limited chances for individual mobility,the belief in oneself as “good” in the teeth of less than ideal choices.

Ⅴ.Personification as the repentant colonizer after the massacre

Thornhill is a melancholic form by the novel’s end,dejected,disinterested and pathologically sad.His innocence in relation to his criminal activity is a well-used motif for prisoners transported to Australia.Following the massacre,the novel explicitly conjures up feelings of separation,portraying the outcome for Thornhill as remains decidedly repentant and unsettled,literally a “puzzled old man”.Grenville deploys all these invented specifics only to invoke what look like universal themes of love,fear or death.

Although a “king” and his wife the “queen” in their mansion,deep down Thornhill’s heart he knows that,unlike Long Jack,the Aboriginal survivor of the massacre,he does not have “a place that was part of his flesh and spirit” ( Searching 329);despite his attachment to the land,Thornhill is rendered oddly estranged from it by the novel’s end:he does not belong to this place.He cannot understand why,after having high stone walls,English garden,and gatepost lions,“it did not feel like triumph” ( Searching 334).As it lingers on and underscores Thornhill’s losses,the novel continues the creation of an empathetic bond with the perpetrator.

This shock also reverberates through another area of Thornhill’s life when he realizes that his participation in the massacre has smashed his relationship with his son,Dick.Dick is ashamed of the massacre his father took part,which comes unexpectedly to Thornhill,who “lost something he had never known to value … until it was gone” ( Searching 326).Dick is a character who most embodies a reconciled coexistence in the novel.As a child,he is drawn to the neighboring Indigenous children on the River( Searching 215).In the aftermath of the massacre,Dick’s repudiation of his father is emblematic of aligning himself instead with Blackwood who represents compassionate responsiveness towards the local Aboriginal people.Thornhill’s participation in the massacre has irrevocably damaged his relationship with his son:“Newcomers did not know that he was William Thornhill’s son.Once he even heard them talk of him as Dick Blackwood.It gave him a shocked feeling,like the cut from a razor” ( Searching 326).

Similarly,his collaboration in the massacre has made a permanent breach in his relationship with Sal who clearly feels implicated in her husband’s act of murder.After the massacre,Thornhill reassures her:“They gone for good and all this time … No need for us to go anywhere just yet a while” ( Searching 323).However,Sal is unsure:“I hope you ain’t done nothing on account of me pushing at you” ( Searching 323).Sal becomes obsessive about him washing his hands.As he washes his hands,“he felt her watching them as if they were her own,” her silence signifying complicity.( Searching 323).A wall of distrust and indifference comes between them in the end:

Thornhill noticed,but said nothing.It was part of the new thing that had taken up residence with them on the night he had come back from the First Branch:a space of silence between husband and wife.It made a little shadow,the thing not spoken of … But whatever Sal knew,or guessed,was with them and could not be shifted.He had not thought that words unsaid could come between two people like a body of water.(Searching 324)

Thornhill’s only measure of peace is when on the veranda of his stone fortress:“He could not say why he had to go on sitting there.Only knew that the one thing that brought him a measure of peace was to peer through the telescope”( Searching 334).Aware that his claim to the land is fragile and paranoid about the potential return of its Indigenous custodians,he gazes across the river at the land for which he has fought long and hard to possess,only to find himself confronting emptiness:

Sometimes he thought he saw a man there,looking down from the cliff top;Told himself that was a man,a man as dark as the scorched trunk of a stringy bark,standing on the lip of the stage,looking through the air to where he sat looking back.He strained,squinted through the glass until his eyeballs were dry.Finally,he had to recognize that it was no human,just another tree,the size and posture of a man.Each time,it was a new emptiness.(Searching 330-333)

Although not articulated by Thornhill himself,his deeply felt remorse is palpable to the readers and his traumatic memories inexorably and relentlessly come to the fore.As Thornhill scans the surrounding bush for signs of natives he is actually searching for atonement.He hopes that there is some possibility of presence.Seeking forgiveness and offering reparation,Thornhill and Sal try to make amends to Long Jack through offerings of food and clothing.

Neither comprehended nor articulated by Thornhill himself,this confusion is made palpable to the reader in the shape of remorse.The novel ends with an aging Thornhill surveying his impressive walled estate with a hollow feeling.This image of a sensitive and repentant colonizer is central for the novel because it offers an alternative choice for the present Australia society:some may be descended from the more sinless and contingent colonizers such as Thornhill.In essence,the narrative locates the characters within two camps,those with sensitivity to the Indigenous population and those who are racist.Thornhill straddles the two.He ends up appearing pitiful in his final representation.By far,the novel successfully presents a melancholic rendering of the Australian nation’s foundational moments.

Ⅵ.Conclusion

Despite the achievements of the reconciliation movement and Sorry Day bridge walks around the country,many Australians do not give Indigenous issues a second thought.According to David Carter,settler peoples,especially Anglo-Australians,“are not used to thinking of their history as contentious,morally compromised or volatile,as dangerous,as,say,Japanese or South African history” (12).With Australia’s history wars drummed up during the Howard government (1996-2007),anxieties were reinforced with the pressing realization that the foundation of the nation had come at the expense of previously unacknowledged acts of Aboriginal dispossession.

Grenville adores the engagement with the past and its traces that comes with history-making. The Secret River is based on the true story of Grenville’s convict ancestors,Solomon Wiseman,a London boatman transported for theft.She cleverly takes that story as a means of exploring colonialism’s impact on Australia’s Aboriginal peoples.While the fallibility of humanness in Thornhill engages reader sympathy,this is problematic in a text about first contact.Since it makes the outcome comprehensible and this sympathy inadvertently risks justifying the wrongdoing towards the first peoples.

The Secret River rewrites dispossession and massacre in a way that is more empathetic of settler perpetrators with the protagonist Thornhill portrayed as a victim as well as the unintentional perpetrator.His characterization provides material for understanding what he has become,and this works a fine line between justification for the early colonists and seeking to understand the diversity of their backgrounds.

Readers cannot but confront the question:what does it mean to be a white Australian who is descended from those who displaced Aboriginal people?According to Paul Salzman,sympathetic treatment of Thornhill combines with the reader’s hindsight to allow him or her to feel thoroughly insulated from the horrifying racism of characters like Smasher,while at the same time gaining satisfaction from Thornhill’s occasional moral insights that anticipate modern liberal truisms.Grenville’s representation of Thornhill’s character provides an “empathizing and imaginative understanding of those difficult events” (Grenville Interview) which leads to a very sentimental picture of convict ancestor’s implication in Aboriginal genocide and dispossession.In this way,despite her averred commitment,signified by The Secret River’s dedication to “the Aboriginal people of Australia:past,present and future”,the novel’s empathetic personification of the protagonist undoubtedly contributes to a failure of engagement in the national reconciliation process.

Notes:

〔1〕Clendinnen,I,The history question:Who owns the past? Quarterly Essay,23,2006,pp.1-7.

〔2〕Clendinnen,I,The history question:Response to correspondence, Quarterly Essay,25,2007,pp.73-77.

〔3〕Collins,Eleanor,Poison in the Flour:Kate Grenville’s The Secret River,in Sue,Kossew(ed.), Lighting Dark Places:Essays on Kate Grenville,Amsterdam and New York:Rodopi,2010,pp.167-178.

〔4〕David,Carter,Working on the past,working on the future,in Richard Nile and Michael Peterson (eds.), Becoming Australian,St Lucia:University of Queensland Press,1998,p.12.

〔5〕Grenville,Kate, The Secret River,Edinburgh:Canongate,2008,pp.6,12,16,45,101,107,110,125,182,230,262,264,277,279,289,297,298,300,303,307,308.

〔6〕Grenville,Kate, Searching for the Secret River,Melbourne:Text,2006,pp.132,189,215,282,283,323,324,326,329,334.

〔7〕Grenville,Kate,Interview by Ramona Koval,Radio National Books and Writing 8 January 2006,http://www.abc.net.au/rn/arts/bwriting/stories/s1527708.htm,Accessed on 16 February 2017.

〔8〕Hirst,J.,Forget modern views when bringing up the past, The Australian,3,2006,pp.23-29.

〔9〕Hirst,J.,How sorry can we be? in Sense and nonsense in Australian history,Melbourne:Black Inc,2005,pp.80-103.

〔10〕Kossew,Sue,Voicing the “Great Australian Silence”:Kate Grenville’s Narrative of Settlement in The Secret River,Journal of Commonwealth Literature,42,2007,pp.7-18.

〔11〕Kelada,Odette,The Stolen River:Possession and Race Representation in Grenville’s ColonialNarrative, JASAL,10,2010,pp.1-15

〔12〕Ken Gelder,Paul Salzman, After the Celebration:Australian Fiction 1989-2007,Carlton:MelbourneUniversity Press,2009,p.85.

〔13〕McKenna,M.,Writing the past, Australian Financial Review,12,2005,pp.45-49

〔14〕McKenna,M.,Writing the past: History,literature & the public sphere in Australia,Humanities Writing Project Lecture,Griffith University,Brisbane,1 December 2005.