When the personal is unsettling

Kate Grenville’s new book, Unsettled, takes the reader back through lands taken, not taken up.

Author Kate Grenville has made public a private journey into her family’s history. Aaron Francis/The Australian

When Kate Grenville decided to embark on a private, exploratory pilgrimage of the country her settler ancestors claimed and lived on, starting with her great-great-great-grandfather, Solomon Wiseman, she says right at the start that she was going to: “Walk on the place, that’s all. And see what comes.”

It’s not hard to imagine, however, that Grenville must have already known that her pilgrimage would become a book, and so the first of many dualities played out in Unsettled appears: how, as a writer, do you make a private journey public?

Grenville invites us into her journey, a seemingly simple road trip, a woman in her 70s, setting off in her car following her ancestors’ meandering, and yet also relentless progress, from Wiseman’s Ferry to Bucketty, Wollombi, Jerry’s Plains and north still through Quirindi and Currabubula, with three separate tributary journeys from Tamworth to Gin’s Leap – that name producing an instantly queasy feeling in the stomach – Bingara and Guyra.

One of the dualities Grenville explores in the book is the difference between “knowing” and “feeling”. It was the marriage ­between the two of those sometimes oppositional points of view that made her novel, The Secret River, so successful, and confirmed Grenville as an acclaimed writer of historical fiction.

In Unsettled, Grenville attempts the same union, using her known historical knowledge and research, to, as she says, imagine and conjure up her way into what happened as the early white settlers invaded Australia and set about decimating the original inhabitants of this massive continent.

Author Kate Grenville

This is a book of deep and complex musings with sharp illuminations – tiny gold nuggets rising up through the hidden sands of time. Grenville shines a light on the expression “took up” – the acknowledged way of addressing the fact that settlers acquired, at no monetary cost, parcels and tracts of land, with no acknowledgment that ownership existed before their arrival.

Grenville ponders how different our history might have been if the word used had been “took”, a much more active and more precise explanation of what actually occurred.

We came. We took. We plundered. Grenville points out that there were good men and women among the early settlers who were horrified by the massacres, the mass poisonings, the land grabs and the daily treatment of the First Nations people of Australia, with some of the early artists, writers, explorers and acute observers of this new colony seeing the hinted-at depths of this ancient civilisation. But “progress” was relentless and unforgiving, and Grenville deduces – as her journey unfolds through river flats, mountains and small country towns – that it was highly unlikely her ancestors, as they pushed further and further north, behaved well.

This book is, perhaps, without saying it, an attempt to answer the few critics of The Secret River who were disturbed by the absence of an Indigenous storyline or what they felt were historical inaccuracies. However it started, it seems to have become a passion project for Grenville, a search to understand how culpable her ancestors were, and whether it is possible for Grenville, one individual writer, to somehow make reparations, or to come to an understanding of what in essence is survivor’s guilt.

In fact, the question of guilt comes up again and again. Grenville questions why, when she didn’t exist at the time, when she could have no direct knowledge of what happened, she carries such a sense of guilt about her lineage that it expresses itself as a constant refrain in the book. She descends, she writes, from people who were “on the sharp edge of the moving blade that was colonisation”. The book was written on Wurundjeri and Dharawal Country, and as Grenville says in her acknowledgments, First Nations people and historians are on every page, ­giving her a path forward on both her physical and contemplative journey through time and place.

Unsettled by Kate Grenville

So much careful thought has gone into the creation of this book that, in a sense, through her own journey, Grenville gives her readers a road map for a deeper understanding of the barbarism of Australia’s white settler history, and the reverberations of that barbarism that continue to this day.

The book allows the reader space to breathe somewhere ­between the worlds of fact and fiction, and feel into the space ­between the past and present.

On a drive to the Piallaway region, south of Tamworth, to search for the property of one of her ancestors, John Martin Davis, Grenville is suddenly overwhelmed with sadness. “What is happening?” she writes, “what’s this swelling up in me, this vast sorrow?”

The answer, she decides, is obvious, when you stand in “a place of such piercing beauty where so many ugly things ­happened”.

I came to Australia in the mid-70s from England, and in some twist of fate I was given the opportunity to travel around much of Australia, first of all on a theatre tour through regional NSW, Queensland and the ACT, later working on numerous car rallies and feature stories as a photojournalist. I didn’t live in ignorance of Australia’s First Nations people and their history, although I think a full awakening only occurred back in 2003 when I went to the Garma Festival and experienced for four extraordinary days full immersion into Indigenous culture. I’ve spent the past 21 years of my life on Bundjalung Country in the Northern Rivers, and have recently moved to the Armidale region, Anaiwan Country, known, of course, as New England. Until I read Grenville’s book, I had not really stopped to consider the full cost of the seasonal, imported beauty of this region.

Unsettled has taught me more than any history book could. It’s opened my eyes to the importance of staying informed, of staying connected, of remaining, in a sense, unsettled.

Candida Baker is a writer and critic.

ABOUT
KATE GRENVILLE

Kate Grenville was born in 1950 and grew up in Sydney, earning an Arts degree from Sydney University. Her first job was at Film Australia, editing documentary films. She worked and studied in the US and Europe, and toiled for several years at the Special Broadcasting Service as an editor of subtitles. An early manuscript, Lilian’s Story, won the Vogel Prize, sponsored by The Australian, in 1984. She has been awarded several Australia Council grants, and a version of The Secret River was the thesis for a Doctorate of Creative Arts from the University of Technology Sydney. She
received the Order of
Australia in 2018.