I first met Kate Grenville at the 2002 Brisbane Writers’ Festival. All out-of-town writers were staying at the same hotel and each morning we early risers gravitated toward a common breakfast table. It became a daily occasion that I much looked forward to, with breakfast always stretching over two hours. Regulars at our table were Romona Koval, Alex Miller, Gabrielle Lord, Gail Bell, Kate and myself – others came and went but we were the regulars.Kate and I bumped into each other several times after that back in Sydney and it was at these meetings that she told me about the book she was writing and about some of the predicaments she had to deal with. The book was The Secret River and her predicaments involved the vanishings of large numbers of Aboriginal clans from the Hawkesbury/Nepean River region, west of Sydney.
I loved the book and told her so, when only 40 pages into it, it only got better from my viewpoint. And the book received ravings from international reviewers. Domestically there were several dissenters from the praise, notable among these was Jennifer Byrne on ABC Television’s First Tuesday Book Club programme who said she felt she was being preached to from Kate’s book pages.
Recently Kate agreed to an interview with me that I included as part of my doctoral thesis. There is one question and answer from the interview that I want share.
PM: Look, I read one particular critic … that I don’t agree with … who said that in The Secret River you sounded like an apologist for the invading people. What do you say to that point of view?
KG: I‘m … I’m disappointed that anybody could read The Secret River and feel that. The vast majority of responses have been the opposite. In fact many people have told me that they find the end of the book very confronting and quite a lot have been prepared to say that they didn’t finish the book - non Indigenous Australians - because they actually couldn’t face what they knew was about to come.
KG: For anyone to read this and think I am an apologist for settler Australians is misreading it. I think everybody has a right to read a book in their own way. It is certainly not what I intended. It was a balancing act in the book, that I had to do. I didn’t want to make the whites the villains or simplistic evil characters. That seemed to me to miss the whole point, and in a way let the people off the hook. So it was a balancing act, when you are balancing on a tight rope like that some people might perceive that you have fallen off on one side or the other.
As a writer of Aboriginal subject matter I knew exactly what Kate meant.
http://www.gleebooks.com.au/default.asp?p=displaybook_asp?bookId=179478&isbn=9781921145254&from=search
2 comments:
Hi Phil
Great work, mon ami! You have created an informative and fascinating site. Best wishes for its future.
I had to throw in my two bobs worth on ‘The Secret River’, which I thoroughly enjoyed. I feel that Kate Grenville performs a most admirable balancing act in this narrative. She tackles the encounters of different peoples with great sensitivity and depth. I don’t think it is apologist but rather that it is an acute insight into the complexity of the encounter of individuals from completely different realities. I have recommended it to several friends who have also been moved by this skilfully composed tale. Cathy
Thanks Cathy, I know you like Kate's work. She crafts her words well and has really good stories to tell.
PMc
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