Unsettled by Kate Grenville

As a non-Indigenous Australian, well aware of Australia’s shameful history, Kate Grenville asks what should she do, knowing that she has benefited from a violent past. How does she come to terms with that? She says that the failure of the Voice referendum, giving people permission to look away and retreat from truth telling, prompted her instead to burrow into the hard questions. She undertook a personal pilgrimage, not so much digging up the historical record, as venturing with an open mind and an open heart, to listen, to feel, and to reflect.

Her previous novels have explored Australia’s colonial history; this time she chooses simply to follow in the paths of her ancestors and stand in the places where land was taken from the original inhabitants and understand what that meant.

In her journey she observes the sheep paddocks that have replaced the Indigenous midyini yam daisy plantings, the roads built along original Aboriginal tracks, the ‘heritage’ pubs that ignore older heritage, the fenced properties sectioning up the bigger landscape of another people’s Country.

She observes the ubiquitous war memorials in country towns, ‘Lest we forget’, and the absence of memorials for the fallen warriors of the Aboriginal resistance.

She considers the meaning of places with names like Gins Leap and Poison Swamp, and also of properties that have usurped Aboriginal names for ‘My home’, or ‘meeting place’. She traces the location of the lost Myall water holes and eventually approaches the site of the Myall Creek massacre. The trial of seven white men for the murder of around thirty people at that site was the start of the Great Australian Silence about what happened across the country.

Finally at Myall Creek there are plaques in memory of the murdered Wirrayaraay people, as an act of ‘acknowledgement of the truth of our shared history’, an act of reconciliation. It is a place to stop, be still, to be aware of the history. Grenville writes that the truth of what took place in this country is there; we just have to look.

Grenville’s book is a personal pilgrimage, but her observations and words of inquiry and reflection raise many questions for readers to grapple with. Her past research of her family’s history has been presented as historical fiction: The secret river (2005), Restless Dolly Maunder (2023), and others. This latest book is non-fiction but is compelling and easy to read, a very accessible way to raise important issues that deserve the attention of all Australians. Highly recommended for secondary schools.

Themes: Australian history, Dispossession, First Nations, Truth-telling, Reconciliation.

Helen Eddy