Author: Kate Grenville
Publisher: Black Inc[1]
Reviewer: Stephen Keim
Kate Grenville is a distinguished Australian writer of fiction and other genre. She has published fifteen books. Her 2005 novel, The Sacred River, won many prizes including the Commonwealth Writers Prize and was adapted for the stage in 2019 and toured by the Sydney Theatre Company. Her novels have been published worldwide and translated into a number of languages.
The Sacred River was based on research into an ancestor, Soloman Wiseman, who had been transported to Australia for theft and who went on to settle in the Hawkesbury River district and gave his name to the town of Wiseman’s Ferry. The Secret River was dedicated to the Aboriginal people of Australia and dealt with the impacts of contacts between First Nations Australians and the continually widening stream of colonial settlers.
Unsettled is a return to the actions of her ancestors and the impact of their actions on the First Nations people they displaced. Unsettled, in form at least, is the story of a road trip. Grenville heads north to Wiseman’s Ferry, observes various landmarks associated with Soloman and then she heads further north. Just as successive generations after Soloman had headed of to find new land to occupy unheeding of those who worked and occupied that land, Grenville follows in their tracks and looks to visit landmarks associated with each of those generations.
The chapters in the book carry place names and they mark the points along the journey: names such as Wisman’s Ferry; St Albans Common; Jerry’s Plains; the Myall Waterholes (not the same place as Myall Creek); Gin’s Leap; Guyra; and, finally, Myall Creek, the site of the famous massacre and the only massacre of Indigenous people for which anyone was brought to account.
None of Grenville’s ancestors were associated with the events at Myall Creek but, as the road trip proceeded, it became obvious to Grenville, that any level of the understanding and consciousness for which she was seeking necessitated that she visit Myall Creek.
Grenville explains the purpose of her journey and Unsettled in her preface. It’s about the questions that come from being a non-Indigenous person in Australia. What do we do with the fact that we’re the beneficiaries of a violent past? If we acknowledge that we are on land that was taken from other people, what do we do about that?
The preface goes on to set out many difficulties to which the questions give rise. These include the settler-centric nature of the questions, placing us in the centre and pushing to the fringes those people who have suffered from the impact of that theft and violence for nearly two and a half centuries. Despite the difficulties, Grenville regards the quest for answers, on balance, worth pursuing and Unsettled is the result.
Grenville has the advantage of the deep research conducted for The Secret River and other of her fictional works. Her knowledge of the places that she visits and through which she passes is much deeper than the reader might possess if she chose to pursue the tracks of her ancestors. Grenville is also guided by a family history which she received from her own mother. Her knowledge of the family story is reinforced by Grenville’s efforts in placing her mother in front of a tape recorder on repeated occasions and inviting her mother to talk.
The family story, as told by Grenville’s mother, was a history of events spanning generations told from the viewpoint of white settlers who were party to or benefitted from the dispossession of the original land on which the settlers came to raise their sheep and make a comfortable living. Of all the many things missing from the narrative, the acts of dispossession and even the original owners of the land are crucially important.
Unsettled proceeds, in many respects, as a dialogue between the family story and other colonial settler narratives on the one hand and Grenville’s search for a place to stand[2] in her own imagination on the other.
As with any road trip narrative, the book is not written en route. Years of research precede starting the ignition for the first time and at least months of dreary writing follow before the finished product is available. But, as with all great road trip stories, Grenville manages to keep her narrative sounding spontaneous and as if every thought put down on paper came into existence at the very point in the road journey indicated in the text.
In accord with the difficulty of the task, Grenville speculates and counter-speculates. She comes to a realisation and then realises that this conclusion is cheap or, at least, incomplete. The process, however, feels honest and the reader feels at home with the contradictory realities being progressively uncovered in the text.
The final event of Unsettled is the visit to Myall Creek including to the plaque erected, there, “on 10 June 2000 by a group of Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal Australians in an act of reconciliation, and in acknowledgement of the truth of our shared history.”
The plaque also says that it is “in memory of the Wirrayaraay people who were murdered on the slopes of this ridge in an unprovoked but premeditated act in the late afternoon of 10 June 1838”.
In the presence of the memorial, Grenville is able to make some tentative conclusions. She acknowledges that her journey has just begun. People like Grenville, herself, this reviewer and many of our readers, have to come to belonging not by right but by a journey into some hard places of the spirit.
But there is no way forward without acknowledging the things that were done. The memorial shows what can happen when dark things are brought into the light. People can come together.
And the land, itself, is a memorial. The ground, itself, the actual hills and valleys and rocks and trees and streams of water where the past happened.
The truth is right here, in front of our eyes, still written on the landscape.
We just have to look.
It is difficult to disagree.
[1] An imprint of Schwarz Books Pty Ltd
[2] “There is no decent place to stand in a massacre”: Leonard Cohen from The Captain: https://genius.com/Leonard-cohen-the-captain-lyrics.
