The Secret River

I'm hardly a specialist in the subject, but there appears to be a running theme in Australian historical fiction: the often fatal collision between British values, both material and spiritual, with the brutalities of the Australian landscape.  And, depending on when the novel is set, with the Australian natives themselves.  The Fortunes of Richard Mahony, The Yandilli Trilogy, Picnic at Hanging Rock, Oscar and Lucinda, and Bring Larks and Heroes, for example, all observe the crash with more or less pitiless gazes (Richard Mahony has perhaps more sympathy than the others).  Kate Grenville's The Secret River (2006) rings the most recent changes on this theme.  Set in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the novel traces the misfortunes of William Thornhill, a waterman transported for life after he is caught stealing some expensive wood.  Once in Australia, though, the put-upon Thornhill sees an opportunity to improve his family's fortunes by appropriating some apparently empty land.  The land, however, is not so empty as it appears at first glance.

Grenville maps out Thornhill's story through a series of spaces.  He begins in a slum, where "no one could move an elbow without hitting the wall or the table or a sister or a brother" (9); discovers both Sal, his eventual wife, and the creature comforts of her on-the-verge-of-bourgeois home; acquires Sal and a small but respectable room, but then must begin thieving to support his family; winds up in Newgate (where he is once again "packed tight" [59]); and, finally, arrives in a ramshackle hut in Australia.  Australian land, though, is not a space like any of these others:

A chaos opened up inside him, a confusion of wanting.  No one had ever spoken to him of how a man might fall in love with a piece of ground.  No one had ever spoken of how there could be this teasing sparkle and dance of light among the trees, this calm clean space that invited feet to enter it.

He let himself imagine it: standing on the crest of that slope, looking down over his own place.  Thornhill's Point.  It was a piercing hunger in his guts: to own it.  To say mine, in a way he had never been able to say mine of anything at all.  He had not known until this minute that it was something he wanted so much.  (106)

What Thornhill discovers, in this awakening of desire, is the prospect of not just a new home, but also of a new identity: the property owner.  Grenville represents his new yearning as romantic, even quasi-sexual.  The light is "teasing"; the "calm clean space," almost virginal in its blankness, invites possession.  And that apostrophe "s"--"Thornhill's Point"--carries a quiet but momentous weight.  Even in the most comfortable eras of Thornhill's life, property has been something rented, or borrowed, or stolen.  To own property, then, means achieving stability that is both material and subjective; the very existence of the place reinforces the selfhood of its owner. 

The difficulty, of course, is that the land is not empty.  In Grenville's imagination, early nineteenth-century society operates entirely according to a logic based on theft: the upper classes will cheat the bargemen, given the opportunity; the working poor regularly receive wages that are too low for subsistence; many of the characters must supplement their "honest" earnings by stealing.  Once in Australia, Thornhill continues to steal--much of his wealth, in fact, derives from stolen liquor.  Not surprisingly, colonizing the Australian wilderness becomes just one more form of theft.  Even though Thornhill discovers that his land is already being cultivated, he reassures himself that "everyone knew the blacks did not plant things" (141).  While Blackwood--an old acquaintance of Thornhill's who was also transported--abides by the philosophy of "Give a little, take a little" (208), and therefore manages to achieve a precarious equilibrium with the Aborigines, it proves impossible to reconcile this approach with the larger system of exploitation in which Thornhill and the other ex-convicts exist. 

In effect, men like Thornhill serve as the advance guard for the government; formerly exploited in England, they are now expected to do the hard work of colonization in Australia.  Thornhill's uneasy recognition that the Aborigines are individuals impedes that project, while Blackwood's attitude is fatal to it.  The novel is not about the higher-ups, however, but the middlemen, who are not colonizing "for England" so much as trying to reinvent themselves in what had promised to be an empty space.  When Thornhill chooses to join the other local men in staging a violent raid on the Aborigines, his reasons are entirely personal: "How could he choose between his wife and his place? Making things so that she would stay was worth any price" (299).  One notes here the unquestioned use of the possessive; one also notes the ominous "any price."  While Thornhill is almost a non-participant in the murderous raid--he shoots one man--he does partly lose the wife he was trying to keep, as their relationship reforms around the "silent place" of the unspoken truth (325). 

Thornhill's last two spaces are both psychological and physical, and neither is quite comfortable.  There is the gap left by the raid and what it implies about Thornhill himself: "Whatever the shadow was that lived with them, it did not belong just to him, but to her as well: it was a space they both inhabited" (325).  Far from escaping the instability of his early life, Thornhill has simply reinstated it--courtesy of the lie that forms the foundation of his new life as an established property owner.  An Aboriginal carving of a fish really does lie under the foundation of Thornhill's house, and that house embodies all that has gone wrong with the attempt to import "Englishness" into Australia.  It is supposed to fulfil all of the Thornhills' fantasies of the landed gentry, and yet nothing is quite right with it: the English garden dies, his stone lions are "like tabbies in front of the fire" instead of threatening (315), and when it comes to the house itself, "[s]omething was wrong with the way the pieces fitted together: some were too big, others too small" (315).  Simultaneously impressive and entirely inaccurate, a bastardized version of the wealthy Englishman's manor, the house inadvertently reveals the failure of Thornhill's self-making. 

It is here that the novel takes the easy way out.  I complained of Grenville's first novel, Lilian's Story, that "I found it hard to resist the suspicion that I was being sold a bill of goods," and I was muttering similar complaints to myself as I finished The Secret River's final chapter.  Those of us who survived graduate school in the 90s may remember postcolonial "anxiety," as theorized by Sara Suleri et al.  The colonizer manifests a residual unease, not quite acknowledged yet not quite suppressed in his discourse.  Now, at the end of The Secret River, Thornhill suffers from just the proper amount of "anxiety."  He becomes enraged at his unwilling realization that Jack (the only Aborigine to survive the raid) experiences something that he cannot: "This was something he did not have: a place that was part of his flesh and spirit" (329).  Thornhill's appropriation of the land is not, after all, a romance; there is no actual "marriage."  And the bench from which he surveys his hard-won property "should have been the reward," but "[h]e could not understand why it did not feel like triumph" (334).  Material possession does not provide the same sustenance as an organic relationship to the land, and poor Thornhill has been sentenced to a life of unwitting self-alienation.  My dissatisfaction with the "anxiety" diagnosis in postcolonial theory applies here as well: whose anxiety is this? Does it belong to the colonizer suppressing his guilt, his awareness of what threatens to undermine his position, or the modern reader afraid that the colonizer might not have felt guilty, let alone aware? The ending of Grenville's novel poses no challenge to the "enlightened" modern reader.  Thornhill's repressed guilt, hiding from his consciousness like the fish carving under his house, is apparently just the right degree of punishment--exactly what we hope he would feel.  But doesn't that "comfortable" ending (after all, it's comfortable for us; we know what's wrong and can even sympathize with Thornhill's predicament) flinch away from the possibilities raised by the narrative itself?