The Secret River

Connie Marshner

 

Australia’s Kate Grenville was unknown to me before I picked up The Secret River, the dust jacket of which announces that it was the 2006 winner of the Commonwealth Prize.

 

Now, I will be the first to admit I know nothing of this prize, but I do assume that it’s the sort of thing that generally is awarded to politically correct writers.  For instance, years ago I learned not to trust the last couple decades of the Newberry Award as a standard for books for my children for precisely that reason. 

 
A Thames bargeman’s struggle against poverty and desperation in  London culminates in his transportation to Australia in 1805, but that is only the beginning of the tale.

 
Descendants of those early settlers don’t talk much about their ancestors, and The Secret River helps explain why. Grenville did extensive research on her own ancestors, and her crafting it as a novel sparked a controversy Down Under over whether fiction “is an untrustworthy vehicle by which to understand the past.”

 
Charlotte Mason might weigh in on that debate, but after reading the book, I dare to surmise that  the professional historians don’t like it because as a novel it remains true to art, i.e., true to human nature – and thus avoids the political correctness that fashionable historians no doubt would have preferred.

 
Once again, I had the delightful experience of expecting political correctness and being disappointed. In Australia the aborigines were not as numerous as American Indians, nor as advanced, but the settlers were terrified of them nonetheless, and there were no interpreters. The result, of course, was tragedy. But because it is a novel, it is the story of one man’s heartfelt struggle to make a future for his family, and the hard choices he had to make, instead of a screed against white males.

 
Speaking of the early settlement experience of  Australia:  Does anybody remember that wonderful early 80’s made-for-TV movie Against the Wind? I wish the Australian TV station that produced that would reissue it as a DVD.