Literature and Politics

Kate Grenville's The Secret River can be read as an intervention in the History Wars. Historians from all sides of the debate have lambasted the work either as a woolly-headed liberal fantasy, a simplistic attempt to access an alien past, or as unconsciously conservative anti-historical myth-making. All critics recognise the novel's political significance and its relation to debates about colonisation, frontier violence and national identity. By analysing the novel in light of Ann Curthoys' conception of Australian historical mythology, in which settler belonging is predicated on Judeo-Christian narrative tropes of fall, exile and redemption, it is possible to see Grenville's work as occupying the contested middle ground of the History Wars. Contrary to her claim to stand outside historical debate, Grenville’s novel actually synthesises different representations of Australian colonialism, exploring the diverse experiences of suffering on the frontier. If, as Curthoys argues, white Australians have based their claim to the continent on their supposed status as victims of oppression, Grenville shows how settlers could simultaneously oppress and be oppressed, opening up a space to recognise Indigenous dispossession and interrogate those dynamics of colonial settlement that cannot be reduced to simple binaries. However, by suggesting that colonialism was an individual choice and by representing Indigenous suffering only through the lens of settler consciousness, Grenville risks reasserting Curthoys' biblical paradigm, re-inscribing suffering, in the form of perpetrator guilt, at the core of national history. This kind of historical narrative may produce a new form of colonialism rather than the much longed-for ethical nationalism. Indeed, at the heart of the notion of history associated with Reconciliation lies the possibility that ‘postcolonial’ remembering might be little more than another technique of colonial forgetting.

I am a postgraduate student at the ANU, working on historical fiction and contested notions of national history and identity in Nigeria, Australia and New Zealand.