Weasel words of past & present: ‘Unsettled’ by Kate Grenville
I had been waiting for this book, from the moment I first heard about it.
Kate Grenville’s earlier work, The Secret River (published 2005) has become something of an Australian classic. It’s fictionalised account of her ancestor Solomon Wiseman’s life as a convict, then a wealthy settler on the Hawkesbury River sparked discussion of the realities of the interface between white and black histories of this country.
Since then she has written several other works of historical fiction, and some non-fiction, inspired by or about the lives of her ancestors and their times.
Now she has turned her sharp analysis to the question of ‘What does it mean to be on land that was taken from other people? Now that we know how the taking was done, what do we do with that knowledge?’
Subtitled ‘A journey through time and place’, Unsettled is her account of a pilgrimage of sorts, in which she travels through the places of significance in her family stories, passed on to her by her mother. She is searching for the hidden side of those stories, the people deliberately or carelessly written out of history: the First Peoples with whom her ancestors would have interacted.
In my research and writing about my own family history I have struggled with these questions and the silences of the past. What part did my ancestors play in the dispossession of the First Nations of this land? Were they perpetrators of any of the many acts of violence towards Aboriginal people that took place in colonial and later times? How would I feel if I discovered evidence of this? What would I do with that knowledge?
Like Ms Grenville, I came to the conclusion that all of my ancestors were, in some capacity, complicit in the long act of dispossession since 1788. Many (like the convicts sent here on the transport ships from England and Ireland) unwillingly so. Others (like Grenville, I have ancestors who ‘took up’ land as squatters, benefiting enormously from what was essentially a free-for-all land grab in the early years of white settlement) did so very willingly indeed. Later generations lived (as I do today) in country that was stolen, unceded land.
It is a difficult truth to stare in the face and one that, for generations, white Australians preferred not to see.
Hence the weasel words used to describe the acts of stealing land and the people who stole it (taking up land, opening it up, squatting, land grants, settlers, pioneers, explorers) and ones that were used about the people from whom the land was stolen (blacks, savages, nomads, going walkabout, as examples.) The latter demonstrated a supreme lack of understanding of the subtle and sophisticated worldview and culture of the First Peoples, while the former justified the wholesale robbery of the land and all it contained by the invading colonists.
This book is all about seeing things differently:
Now that I think about it. That’s the thing – I’m thinking about things differently now, rather than sliding along on the well-lubricated surface of unremarkable words. Thinking in a way that allows a whole other story to be glimpsed. No, not even a story, just a suggestion of a suspicion, embedded so far below the surface it’s easy to pooh-pooh it as ridiculous.
Unsettled p35This is a very personal journey and a very personal story. But Grenville’s skill as a storyteller weaves a tale that is both individual and general to all Australians. While imparting her unique responses to the places she visits, the experiences she has on her travels and what she finds in her research, the questions she poses are for us all to consider.
Her comments about the popularity of family history resonate with me, and I think are meaningful on a bigger scale as well:
we…need to be asking questions about our forebears. Not to reassure ourselves, and not to make any claims for ourselves, but to learn how we really fit – and the ways we don’t fit – into the story of being here.
Unsettled p206I could not agree more.
Here is Kate Grenville discussing the impulse that set her on the journey of exploration that resulted in Unsettled.
Unsettled was published by Black Inc Books in 2025
Why I am thankful for feminism: ‘Restless Dolly Maunder’ by Kate Grenville
Kate Grenville’s latest offering is a novel woven from family stories of her grandmother, who was born into rural poverty towards the end of the nineteenth century.
Readers of The Secret River will recognise Dolly as the granddaughter of Sarah Wiseman, the daughter of that earlier book’s fictionalised protagonist based on Solomon Wiseman. Solomon, the author’s ancestor, was an emancipated convict who settled in the upper reaches of the Hawkesbury River in a spot later named for him – Wiseman’s Ferry.
The novel describes in painful detail the restrictions on women in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, especially (but not exclusively) for poor women.
The small worlds they inhabited, the never-ending chores it was assumed they’d be responsible for simply because they were born female; the limited options for their futures – marriage, or spinsterhood while working as a nurse or teacher.
Girls were of no account, you learned that early on. Good enough to make the bread and milk the cow, and later on you’d look after the children. But no woman was ever going to be part of the real business of the world.
Restless Dolly Maunder eBook location 14 of 293Dolly is born wanting more, wanting movement in her life when the world tells her she must be still, be satisfied with her lot. Whip smart yet denied an education past 14 years, and lucky to get that, being young enough to benefit from new government laws that required all children under 14 to regularly attend school.
As always with this author, the prose is uncannily evocative: Grenville has the ability to climb right inside her characters’ heads and make the reader feel they are there as well. Simple language but always the exact right word chosen for the right moment in the story.
Dolly is a prickly character, not particularly likeable at any point in the story. But the author’s skill is to make us care about her anyway. There is an especially poignant moment in her author’s note, describing a childhood encounter between the young Kate and her grandmother, where she looks back with empathy and wishes in retrospect that she had responded differently. I am sure we have all experienced such moments, haven’t we?
Dolly experiences the ups and downs of economy, drought, commodity prices, war, Depression; all of which impact on her and her family.These are factors beyond her control but she brings to bear her characteristic decisiveness (and restlessness) as she tries to respond to these big picture challenges.
All you could say was, you were born into a world that made it easy for you or made it hard for you, and all you could do was stumble along under the weight of whatever you’d been given to carry. No wonder at the end of it you were tired, and sad. But glad to have done it all, even the mistakes.
Restless Dolly Maunder loc 281-282This book made me feel, once again, deeply thankful for the achievements of feminism that have allowed women in the western world, at least, to move beyond the small worlds prescribed for them.
She thought of all the women she’d ever known, and all their mothers before them, and the mothers before those mothers, locked into a place where they couldn’t move. My generation was like the hinge, she thought. The door had been shut tight, and when it started to swing open, my generation was the hinge that it had to be forced around on, one surface grinding over another. No wonder it was painful.
Restless Dolly Maunder loc 281We have a long way to travel yet, and so many women around the world still experience difficulties and disadvantages because they are female. Restless Dolly Maunder shows us why that is not acceptable.
Restless Dolly Maunder was published by Text Publishing in July 2023
Another gem from Kate Grenville: ‘A Room Made of Leaves’
The title of Kate Grenville’s latest and much anticipated novel put me in mind of the famous work by Virginia Woolfe – A Room of One’s Own. The message in both titles includes, I believe, the necessity for all women to have a space (whether that be an actual room, a favourite place in nature, or a corner of their imagination) where they can dream, write, plan, think, or simply be. In this and in many other ways, while A Room Made of Leaves might be a work of historical fiction, its themes are as relevant to today as to the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
Kate Grenville is well known to many Australian readers for her novels of colonial Australia, particularly The Secret River, The Lieutenant, and Sarah Thornton.
Her new work has a most wonderful premise: that she has stumbled upon and transcribed the private writings of Elizabeth MacArthur, the wife of John MacArthur, Captain in the NSW Corps and so-called ‘father of the Australian wool industry.’ These scribblings are a ‘warts and all’ account of Elizabeth’s life, much more honest than the carefully penned letters that she wrote for public consumption.
As always, Ms Grenville captures perfectly the voice of her protagonist, a woman of modest background but reasonable education, and convinces us that we are, in fact, hearing a first-hand account of life in colonial Sydney and Parramatta. Through Elizabeth, we meet some of the well-known figures of that time including John MacArthur himself, and Governor Phillip, Watkin Tench, Lieutenant Dawes; also Pemulwuy and other First Nations people who influenced the development of the faltering settlements.
Of course, her real opinions and feelings about her husband, her life and her new home, as compared to the public ones, form the backbone of the narrative and serve to show Elizabeth MacArthur as a woman of much greater aptitude and empathy than the man she is tied to in marriage.
I absolutely loved the way in which the author has used snippets of the actual letters and other writings of Elizabeth, in a way that brings her to life and also hints that she may well have had quite a different inner life than the serene and uncomplaining face she presented to the world.
Elizabeth MacArthur, 1766-1850, from
oil painting in State Library of NSWWriting about a time when women had little agency, she shows that through carefully chosen words, sly irony, and well-kept secrets, some women could and did manage to execute a certain degree of independence of thought, even if that was not always visible to others.
A Room Made of Leaves joins the list of simply wonderful novels by Kate Grenville about early colonial Australia. If you enjoyed her earlier ones, you will love this book.
A Room Made of Leaves was published by Text Publishing in 2020.
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