Sarah Thornhill by Kate Grenville
Text, 2011, ISBN 9781921758515
(Ages: 13 - Adult) Highly recommended. Sarah Thornhill is a currency
lass, one of the first generation of white settlers born in
Australia, with an ex-convict father, William Thornhill, the main
character in Secret River. The novel shows her growing from
an impetuous child, secure in her family and home on the Hawkesbury,
to a young woman who has to accept and live with the consequences of
a brutal event in her father's life on the Hawkesbury. As a child
Sarah becomes aware of secrets, a fourth brother who has rejected
their father, their father's attempts to help a scarred aboriginal
man, her step-mother's contempt for Sarah's friend Jack Langland.
Sarah, or Dolly as she is called by her family, has always loved
Jack and is determined to marry him when he can buy a farm. Will is
drowned in New Zealand while sealing and at his father's insistence
Jack brings his daughter, a Maori child, back to the Hawkesbury to
be raised by the Thornhills. The child, newly named Rachel, clings
to Jack but Jack is partly Aboriginal and leaves when Ma intervenes
and reveals the secret from William Thornhill's past. Sarah
compromises and find happiness in a marriage to a settler from west
of the ranges. This is disturbed when Rachel dies, pregnant at
thirteen and Pa suffers a stroke. Sarah now learns the truth about
his involvement in a massacre of aboriginal people. In an attempt to
expiate her guilt Sarah travels to New Zealand to explain Rachel's
death to her Maori family. Sarah learns to understand the danger of
cultural preconceptions and the shallowness of her own new culture,
in comparison with the depth of Maori traditions.
Grenville attempts to capture the voice of the illiterate Sarah, but
is not as successful in this as she is in describing landscape and
relationships. Characters and places are acutely observed and
imaginatively captured, and the plot moves quickly. The novel is a
love story but is also about the journey of a young woman towards
understanding the nature of family, the importance of the natural
world and her struggle with the question and guilt that faces all
new settlers in Australia. Who possesses this country? What should
be done for the first peoples?
This book does stand alone, despite being a continuation of William
Thornhill's story, and is highly recommended.
Jenny Hamilton