A history in fiction

THE controversy over her most successful novel, The Secret River, has only hardened Kate Grenville’s resolve to tell the stories of Australia’s past.

Kate Grenville

KATE Grenville's eyes light up - but really light up - twice in a long and rambling conversation in the clattery cafeteria of the National Library in Canberra, a home away from home for her, where we are segueing slowly through morning coffee, lunch and cake.

The first time is when I ask what attracted her to her husband, the renowned political cartoonist and artist Bruce Petty, with whom she has two children. “But he’s magic!” she says, in a way that suggests I haven’t got a clue.
The second time is when I ask how, after the public attacks on her personal integrity and professional ethics when her novel The Secret River came out in 2005, she found the emotional wherewithal to return to her desk to begin its sequel, The Lieutenant.

“It was very difficult, actually,” she says with a frown that quickly clears. “But I think the power of the material that the cosmos had given me was too strong. I just had to overcome my distress.” A fabulous friendship “just blazes”, she says, between William Dawes, the young First Fleet officer, and a teenage Aboriginal girl, Patyegarang, whose conversation he took down verbatim in a series of journals. “They’re electrifying. You think, who were these people who could meet half way across that gulf that separated them? They were extraordinary human beings. It was inspiring and wonderful and it restored my faith in human nature.”

And there’s that look again.

Grenville’s position in Australia’s literary world is difficult to define. She is second only to Nobel-winner Patrick White as the most set Australian author on tertiary reading lists. The Secret River, which turns on a massacre of Aboriginal people by white colonists, is the most frequently set text in English courses: it is taught in 42 units, well ahead of the second place-getter, Miles Franklin’s My Brilliant Career, which is taught in 27.

She has won the Orange Prize in the UK for her 1999 novel, The Idea of Perfection, and both the regional and overall Commonwealth Prize for The Secret River. That novel also won the NSW Premier’s Prize for fiction and the Australian Book Industry awards for best Australian fiction and book of the year, was shortlisted for almost every other premier’s prize and longlisted for the IMPAC Dublin prize, which is about as prestigious as you can get before stepping up to the Nobel. The Miles Franklin has eluded her. The year The Secret River was up for it, Roger McDonald’s The Ballad of Desmond Kale, an uncontroversial novel also set in colonial Australia, won. The Secret River has now sold more than 200,000 copies and Grenville has started to make a living from her craft.

Despite this profile, there are those who dismiss her importance. Certainly she doesn’t have the widespread celebrity of other writers: the public gravitas of David Malouf, say, the popular appeal of Tim Winton, or the notoriety of Helen Garner or Germaine Greer. And yet it is in the more contemplative groves of academe, the very place where her texts are so prominent, that I discovered an unwillingness to discuss Grenville. At the risk of special pleading it must be said that this reluctance came from men, authorities on Australian literature, three of whom I contacted and one of whom, at least, referred me to women academics who might have something useful to say. Though each of those men said it was good that a writer could make a living, the word “middlebrow” was tentatively floated at least once. It is hard to imagine anyone dodging in quite the same way questions about Tim Winton’s work, which also avoids stylistic experimentation and tells fast-paced but nationally significant yarns for a wide readership.

“Gravitas and authority often cling more easily to male authors, with their embodiment and deeper voices, their confidence and their clear boundaries. These are things that no one can put their finger on precisely,” says Brigid Rooney, a senior lecturer in Australian literature at Sydney University and author of Literary Activists: Writer-Intellectuals and Australian Public Life. “But she’s a wonderfully passionate, engaging writer who writes very thoughtful and reflective narratives that engage with important issues.

“I do get the feeling that she was taken aback by the controversy that arose about The Secret River and that there was something hurtful about it. Another writer, like Patrick White, it just would have been fuel to get them going, get them into their stride. Maybe there is a gendering of public discourse.”

Elizabeth Webby, another expert in Australian literature and professor emeritus at Sydney University, suggests that the bruising Grenville took – the row over “history versus fiction” (more on this later) – after the publication of The Secret River was largely about turf wars. Historians have been dismissive of her own scholarly work, Webby says with something between resignation and mischievousness in her voice. As for her colleagues in the literary domain: “It really has to do with her writing being reasonably comfortable for people to read,” she says. “It’s a question of how much you value originality in a writer.”

Grenville’s earlier books were more experimental, and perhaps more shocking. More recently, motivated by the issues of race and dispossession, she has been more interested in communication than experimentation. She admits as much herself. “When I went to university in Colorado, I was encouraged to write very innovative, experimental things, and some of the short stories in Bearded Ladies [her first book] are a little bit experimental,” she says. “But by the time I found my subject, in The Secret River and The Lieutenant, that whole idea of Australian history and the secrets it hides, I realised that, yes, I wanted this to be as accessible to as wide a range of readers as possible. That is the subject of my heart, I belatedly realised.”

Grenville is listening to her heart in other areas, too. As a teenager she wanted to play the cello but was discouraged by her father, who said it was the hardest instrument to learn. Ten years ago she took it up anyway, and now she plays regularly with an amateur string quartet and with a community orchestra. “Can you imagine leaving something you desperately want to do for that long?” she asks. “I’ll never be much good, because I’ve taken it up so late, but it’s one of the huge pleasures of my life. And I get better. Every month I can notice a little improvement.” At 60, Grenville seems to be one of those people for whom life doesn’t dwindle but only gets better, more engaged and more successful, with the passage of years.

Grenville knew from a young age that she wanted to be a writer. “Nothing much interested me other than playing with language and telling stories and doing something with the wonders of the world around me,” she says. She grew up in North Sydney in a large, sprawling – but not posh, she emphasises – house filled with books. The garden had lots of nooks and crannies in which she built cubby houses, one of them to house a fine collection of dead snail shells. “It was a great childhood for a writer, because it had everything,” she says. She was a myopic tomboy, trailing after two older brothers. “That’s why I think my writing has quite a spooky, close-up quality quite often,” she says. “It’s the grain of the rock, not the landscape, although now that I’ve got glasses I love the landscape too.”

Her father was a barrister and a writer manqué, who wrote a few books which “sold a couple of copies”, Grenville says, and beguiled the children with bedtime stories. Her mother was a pharmacist, and successful in business with it, before giving up when her youngest was small because arranging reliable childcare was too hard. She was a nationalist and a feminist, and made sure to subvert the gender stereotypes children were usually raised with then. Grenville attended an all-girls state school (Cremorne Girls’ High) where her mostly women teachers were, she says, fabulous role models. At 16, she sent a short story to The Australian Women’s Weekly and treasured as a mark of professional arrival the tiny, pro forma rejection slip they sent.

At Sydney University she majored in English literature. She had a steady boyfriend and “wasn’t a great party animal”. Best of all, she says, being there gave her an excuse to read all day. Once she graduated in 1972, however, she clearly cut loose, though she doesn’t spell it out. She wore crushed velvet dresses, her red and curly hair was wild, it was the ’70s, and she was soon moving in an arty crowd. “I’d figured it out by then,” she says with a slight smile. “I did my best to be wild.”

She worked at Film Australia for five years before accepting a temporary job offer in London, where she started to write. After the job finished Grenville took a flat in Paris for six months and kept writing, finally completing a novel that was “terrible, completely unpublishable”. She also fell in with a circle of American writers and was introduced to a school of writing she barely knew existed. The muscularity of American writing appealed to Grenville’s Australian sensibility. She made a snap decision and enrolled in a writing degree at the University of Colorado, Boulder, then in thrall to the experimental writer, Ron Sukenick. She was 30. “What these people taught me was to let go of a lot of rules I thought you had to obey. What I write now is quite conventional, but I think the conventionality is enriched by the knowledge of what you can do if you want to.”

She also learnt that she wanted to build her life around writing and so, upon her return to Australia, she threw herself into the novel that would bring her to notice: Lilian’s Story, based on the story of Bea Miles, who lived on the street earning pennies by quoting Shakespeare after years in a mental institution recovering from incestuous rape.

“I’d had the experience of being away and thinking about my Sydney life, and Australia, and what it meant to be Australian, and then to be back in it, with the smell of jasmine and the sound of the surf, was just what I needed.”
The manuscript won The Australian/Vogel award for young writers, which has launched so many Australian careers. Grenville just squeaked in under the age limit, which was 35 in those days. The novel, and the prize that allowed it to be published, gave her the confidence to believe in herself. She had found her voice, had explored issues important to her, and knew she would continue writing. Dreamhouse was published a year later and was followed, in 1988, by Joan Makes History, a satirical feminist take on Australian history.

The Bicentennial was a landmark year for Grenville. After several live-in relationships she finally met the man she could commit to. That year she married Bruce Petty and had their first child, Tom. Sam, one of Petty’s two sons from his first marriage to the ABC journalist Julie Rigg, said in a magazine interview that his father is “shy about personal things, and tends to work in subtexts”. Sam was in Rome when he received a letter from his father saying, “I’m not sure how it happened, but Kate is having a baby, and we’re getting married.” Petty is considerably older than she is but, in his early 80s, he is still on staff at the Melbourne Age. A second child, Alice, followed four years later. Grenville says that the families are close, the four kids and she and Petty and Rigg. She has been blessed, she admits: the happy marriage, the close family, the rewarding work.

Having children didn’t slow her down. Petty worked from home and Grenville’s mother helped. She would take Tom two days a week, swapping him for a thermos of coffee and a cut lunch, which Grenville would take to a local park overlooking the harbour. She would hop into the back seat of the car and write by hand on a boogie board. She recalls sitting at their dining table, writing with her right hand and rocking Tom’s pram with her left foot (he was a colicky baby), trying to keep him quiet enough for her to concentrate. The Cyril Connelly quote, “there is no more sombre enemy of good art than the pram in the hall”, comes to mind. Grenville reacts: “Of course, a man said that. How dare he!”

By the late ’80s, Grenville had arrived. Her agent, Barbara Mobbs, says that Patrick White liked Joan Makes History and told her, “This girl is good”. Grenville was included in a book called Eight Voices of the Eighties, a collection of stories, journalism and criticism by Australian women authors. She helped out with Suzanne Falkiner’s short stories project, Room to Move, at Redress Press, and that evolved into a regular monthly lunch attended by Drusilla Modjeska, Helen Garner, Glenda Adams, Falkiner and Grenville. She recalls those lunches as laughter-filled and rarely about writing.

In 1994, a sequel to Lilian’s Story, written from the father’s point of view and called Dark Places, came out. A gothic, discomfiting, compelling work, it marked a subtle shift in Grenville’s interest. For some, those two books remain Grenville’s finest from a literary point of view. “I think she does darkness really well, those really difficult feelings,” says Rooney. “I think those are the most interesting things in all of her work, including her more recent books: the probing of those darker recesses of human consciousness. And she’s applied that now to Australia’s colonial experience.”

Grenville’s shift into the colonial era, and to the relations between black and white in the founding years of the country, began when she made the Sydney Harbour Bridge walk for reconciliation in 2000, for which hundreds of thousands of people turned out. While on it, she made eye contact with an Aboriginal woman. They didn’t speak, but it set off a train of thought. She began researching her own family history: the arrival of Solomon Wiseman, after whom Wiseman’s Ferry is named, a convict from the East End of London, and his development of a land grant received from Governor Macquarie in 1817. The two trains of thought coalesced in The Secret River.

The book won prizes, earned critical acclaim, sold well. Champagne all round. And then the mood soured. The historian Mark McKenna wrote a long piece in The Australian Financial Review criticising what he saw as the overstated claims novelists were making for their contribution to history. Though he quoted the magisterial David Malouf among other novelists and critics, he made a case study of Grenville. To a third party, six years later, the piece seems a tough but not wildly inflammatory contribution to the public discourse. When Inga Clendinnen wrote a Quarterly Essay on the subject the following year, however, her criticism was more pointed and personal. McKenna and Clendinnen took exception to a metaphor that Grenville had used: that she was up a stepladder, able to see across the field of the history wars and not take sides. It is clear, reading it now, that she meant to suggest a position of disinterested observation; the historians took it to mean a position of intellectual, even moral, superiority.

Grenville was blindsided. “The year it came it was the year when Keith Windschuttle and the massacre denialists were in full throat, the people who said, ‘Nothing happened, they all just died of measles, isn’t it sad’. And when my book came out, I had all my answers for those people. I’d done a lot of research – Henry Reynolds is a mine of fantastic information about it. And then it didn’t come from them. It came from people who, I would have thought, politically are on the same side...

“What I was angry about was that academic historians had so distorted words that I had used. If I had said at any point that I was writing history then I would have to stand by that. I’ve actually written to another person and said, ‘Please tell me where I said I write history because if I really said it, I need to eat humble pie.’ I know I wouldn’t have said it because I don’t think I am writing history. At the same time, on my website was a ream of stuff about what I think about history and fiction, and they didn’t quote a single word or phrase from that. All they did was go through newspaper articles and one radio interview. So I can only say that they have their own agenda.”

Grenville felt beleaguered. Debate turned on what she had and hadn’t said. Most of all, it felt unfair. “It is painful,” she says now, “but the real problem is that it displaces discussion, not even of the books but of the issues contained within them.”

Rooney points out that, rather than digging in her heels, Grenville took the criticism on board. “Kate Grenville comes across as a caring sort of individual, but one not easily put off by criticism. She’s a listener. She listens to criticism and she’s responsive to it. I appreciate that about her. We could do with some more of that.”

McKenna hasn’t modified his argument, but perhaps has softened his view of Grenville. “Since I wrote that essay I’ve had the chance to meet and talk with Kate on several occasions in Canberra. I think we now understand one another’s position much better,” he wrote in a recent email. “I don’t think the questions I raised about historical fiction have necessarily subsided, we only need look at recent novels by Kim Scott and Rohan Wilson among others to see how recent historical fiction in Australia is drawn to the frontier encounter. That’s a good thing. What I wanted to highlight (and still do) is the need for clear-sighted debate and reflection on the nature of historical understanding offered by these novels as opposed to that offered by the writing of scholarly history. How do they differ? To what extent can we rely on one more than the other? Do we need both to gain a full understanding of our past?”

By the time the sequel, The Lieutenant, was published in 2008, the literary world was primed for controversy. “It was the year of the apology, and what did it mean that a First Fleet soldier had this deep, respectful, affectionate friendship with an Aboriginal girl. What did it mean for them? What does it mean for us today?” Grenville asks rhetorically. “All that was just not mentioned.”

Now the third novel, Sarah Thornhill, is about to be published. In it, Grenville traces the coming of age of the youngest daughter of William Thornhill, the character in The Secret River based on Grenville’s own forebear. Her publishers are doing her no favours with those literary men: the cover is a dreamy Mills and Boon-style picture of a young woman in period costume looking out across a river. But the story is pacy and provocative and carefully constructed. It remains to be seen how the historians react.

Sarah Thornhill (Text, $39.95) is out on August 29.