Makeover for Mrs Elizabeth Macarthur as Kate Grenville plays with the past

Kate Grenville has written her first novel in a decade and has had fun doing so.

Author Kate Grenville in Melbourne. Picture: Aaron Francis

Kate Grenville has written her first novel in a decade and has had fun doing so. The author, who has had run-ins with historians in the past, stirs the possum even further in A Room Made of Leaves, a retelling of the life of early settler Elizabeth Macarthur.

Where history tells us John Macarthur was the father of the Australian wool industry, Grenville’s novel tells us it’s his wife who should be called the mother of the Australian wool industry. Where history tells us Mrs Macarthur was a dutiful wife and mother in colonial NSW, Grenville’s novel tells us she had an erotic side and a roving eye when it came to Marine Lieutenant William Dawes.

To agitate that possum a little more, the novel masquerades as a just-published memoir by Mrs Macarthur, based on private ­papers secreted in a wax-sealed tin box found in the attic during ­recent renovations to Elizabeth Farm, the former Macarthur ­estate near Parramatta, NSW.

As Grenville writes in her afterword, this is not true. There was no tin box, no private papers, no memoir. She made it up. However, that doesn’t mean she thinks the Mrs Macarthur in her pages is untrue. She thinks she is a “very plausible and consistent with the historical record’’.

“I was always the naughty girl at school and, even at my great age, I’m clearly still the naughty girl in the class,’’ Grenville, 69, tells The Weekend Australian. “Once you start sending up the whole idea of myths, the heroic myths, of people of the past, the way is opened to be kind of playful, or even a bit rule-breaking. I’ve never claimed to write anything but fiction. I’ve never, ever called myself a writer of history.’’ However, her historical novels, including The Secret River, start with deep research into the primary sources. From there, she writes a work of fiction.

Kate Grenville’s latest book.

The Weekend Australian Review.

“That is sometimes confusing for people because, with historical fiction, there is always this grey area, this overlap, like a Venn ­diagram. There’s the stuff that comes out of the historical record, which is sometimes factual, and the stuff that is completely fictional.”

An editor’s note at the start of the “memoir” observes that “Australian history, like most histories, is mainly about men”. Grenville considers Macarthur, an army ­officer who became influential in Sydney under founding governor Arthur Phillip, was “probably one of the most unpleasant people in Australian history”.

She says she has been thinking about writing about Mrs Macarthur for 20 years. “She must have been an extraordinary woman to have done what she did.”

Grenville has been criticised in the past for re-imagining the historical record.

Her new novel is backed by award-winning historian and writer Clare Wright, who says it turns “the leaden shadow of the historical Elizabeth Macarthur into a luminescent, golden woman for our times’’.

“Intelligent, compassionate, strategic and dead sexy, Grenville’s Macarthur is an unforgettable character who makes us question everything we thought we knew about our colonial past.’’

Grenville is not against the push to pull down statutes of people who did bad in the past but adds “but I think rather than destroy them, put them in a context that reminds us of the wrongs and arrogances and ignorances of the past, in the hope that the future can be wiser’’.