Books
Kate Grenville
Unsettled
“We all have appointments with the past,” wrote W. G. Sebald. It’s a statement that’s at once casual and ominous, and could serve as a fitting epigraph for Kate Grenville, who has made a career of retrospective trips into Australia’s colonial history.
What first drew her back to those times was the glamour of heredity. Grenville’s family were early arrivals to the colony of New South Wales during the era of transportation. Her grandfather at three generations’ remove was Solomon Wiseman, a convict made good who lent his name to a township on the banks of the Hawkesbury River.
In novels such as The Secret River and Sarah Thornhill, Grenville inhabited the lives of her forebears and was obliged to confront the reality of European experience at the “sharp edge” of the colonial project: that the new home her family made required the displacement of Indigenous Australians from theirs.
This splinter evidently lodged deep. Even those historical novels by Grenville that deal with other figures in the early colony – William Dawes, Elizabeth Macarthur – are shadowed by the intimation that every achievement won by Europeans in NSW is one more grim addendum to the tragedy of its First Peoples.
Unsettled: A Journey Through Time and Place takes the lingering disquiet of Grenville’s novels and turns it inside out. A non-fiction account of her family that prioritises fact over fancy, it proceeds in a boots-on-the-ground manner: quite literally, since Unsettled takes the form of a physical journey in the footsteps of those descendants of Solomon Wiseman, as, over the generations, they moved further into the land of other peoples, from Sydney’s suburban fringe to Griffith.
It’s worth noting that this approach makes Unsettled a different kind of book to 2006’s Searching for the Secret River – another non-fiction account by Grenville that’s ostensibly about her family. That work was written in part as a response to criticisms historians had levelled at Grenville’s fiction at the time: that she had allowed herself too much creative latitude with real people and events. It was concerned with the archival underpinnings of her fictions, while this new one leaves its papers in the study. It wants to read the land through eyes untrammelled by inherited versions of events.
Yet as a biographer on the hoof, setting out from Wisemans Ferry – from the very house in which her thrice great-grandfather perhaps murdered his first wife – and then northward into NSW, Grenville turns out to be querulous company. Her family’s past is no longer a source of inspiration for her. It is a cupboard full of skeletons whose rattling leaves her on edge:
“Every time I’ve been here I’ve been restless to leave. Today I’m queasy, uneasy, full of a generalised dread. I realise it’s not the cause of the cliffs or the humid air. It’s not about the place. It’s about what I know. For me, this is a haunted landscape, haunted by a past that’s all the darker for the things that were never recorded.”
She also chafes at the self-imposed restrictions of this kind of nonfiction. At moments in the text, Grenville verbally slaps herself for slipping into an overly imaginative mode, her novelist’s instincts filling in gaps that should properly remain open and ambiguous. And while the novel is traditionally an empathy-generating machine, Grenville is at pains here not to enter into Indigenous experience in ways that suborn or overwrite it. This is an act of tact and decency on the author’s part. If your aim is to try to make Indigenous presence tangible to the reader, though, it’s also a straitjacket.
Grenville is at her happiest when simply moving through landscapes that strike her as beautiful. From the riverine idyll of St Albans to the vast openness of the Liverpool Plains, the author records Country with affection, even reverence. You only realise how lulling her descriptions of place are when, having happened upon a mine, her prose flinches in shock. It is as if she has stumbled upon some act of desecration.
What soon becomes clear is that all the places she moves through have been desecrated to some degree. Whether it is interpretative signage at a lookout that glosses over the facts of Indigenous dispossession, or vandalism at the memorial to a massacre, or an old family story about Grenville’s great-great-grandmother, “the blacks” and guns that remain sinister and unfinished in the author’s memory, Grenville’s pilgrimage becomes an accumulation of euphemisms for a national history much bleaker than the official version.
Having discovered by chance that another grandfather was a squatter and not just a blameless publican as she had thought, Grenville is thrust into direct relation with frontier violence – it was the squatters, operating beyond the pale, who most vigorously ensured their land was evacuated of its original inhabitants – and obliged to articulate the feeling this inspires.
Not guilt, since guilt “is something you can put right or balance out”. It is, rather, guilt by descent: the feeling you have when you’ve benefited from a great wrong, though you are innocent of the fundamental crime.
Unsettled was clearly a hard book for Grenville to write. It’s also a difficult book to read. This is because implicit in her family story is a collective one. Her journey reveals a society that has been warped by the effort to avoid the truth of its origins. There is something obscene, Grenville concludes, about a nation that can proceed so blithely into the future, given the nature of its past.
Black Inc, 288pp, $36.99
Black Inc is a Schwartz company
This article was first published in the print edition of The Saturday Paper on April 26, 2025 as "Unsettled".
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