Keywords

1 Introduction

Neo-Victorianism was defined by Marie-Luise Kohlke in 2008 “as term, as genre, as ‘new’ discipline, as cultural happening, as socio-political critique, as reinvigorated historical consciousness, as memory work, as critical interface between past and present” (1). At that stage, many neo-Victorian cultural and literary productions had seen the light for nearly two decades. The main aim of neo-Victorianism is to rewrite the past filling in the gaps of history and giving voice to the victims of violence and discrimination. At the same time, neo-Victorianism establishes a connection between past and present as a reflection of many issues and concerns that preoccupied the Victorians. However, some years later, she added to this definition a trans-national component associated with the fact that Britain in the nineteenth century had one of the biggest empires in history. As a result, neo-Victorian narratives also covered other parts of the world which had been British colonies where stories of atrocities and confrontations between colonisers and the native population happened (Kohlke 2014, 28–29). Thus, postcolonial neo-Victorianism tries to rewrite the history of the Empire but including the voices of Indigenous people trying to give them agency and reparation.

But to provide oppressed populations with restitution, writers and readers, together with critics must reflect upon the issue of historical recollection. As Kate Mitchell argues, the recent role of memory discourse in contemporary critical analysis has provided new ways for examining neo-Victorian fiction as memory texts which encompass “the sheer diversity of modes, motivations and effects of their engagement with the past, particularly to one which moves beyond dismissing affect” (2010a, 2–4). Also, the problematisation of the other that has been brought about by Postmodernism represents a cornerstone in the agenda of neo-Victorian fiction in particular and historical fiction in general, especially when talking about issues of Empire. Thus, I agree with Mitchell in that “[p]ositioning neo-Victorian novels as acts of memory provides a means to critically evaluate their investment in historical recollection as an act in the present” (2010a, 4).

On the other hand, the dynamics of gender and power are also part of the landscape in cultural memory: gender, race and class markers determine the way in which a culture portrays its past through its tropes and codes. In this context, feminist scholarship has recently redefined culture from women’s perspective including their stories, work and artefacts. This new approach is concerned with important aspects such as exile, migration, and immigration connected with the gender politics of decolonisation. Thus, the archive and the transference of memory through spatial and generational frontiers become essential (Hirsch and Smith 2002, 3, 6). In his Culture and Imperialism (1994) Edward Said claimed that the role of the novel had been essential in the creation of imperial attitudes of the West towards the overseas colonies (70–71), hence it is quite appropriate to use the novel to dismantle colonial ideas and categories of the past.

This is what Grenville herself wants to do in her novel. In an interview with Ramona Koval for Australia’s Radio National in July 2005, she talked about her novel as being the story of Australia’s European settlement from a new point of view. In this interview, she asserted that she had spent about a year and a half doing research before starting to write, and that the history of Australia had many secrets that most Australians preferred to ignore. In particular, she was talking about the relationship between white Australians and Aboriginal people. However, at the same time, she argued that, besides history, fiction can be a different way of looking at the past contributing to the “empathising and imaginative understanding of those difficult events” (Grenville 2005b). She decided not “to approach the past in a forensic frame of mind” but to “experience the past”—as if it were happening here and now” (Grenville 2006, 47; text italics). Also, Grenville’s intention when writing this book was to incorporate the missing history of Indigenous Australians into the country’s history, putting an end to “the great Australian silence”.1 This silence, as Grenville argued in another interview with Graeme Harper, had impeded acknowledgement of an Aboriginal past of violence at the hands of English settlers. Moreover, in the same interview, she vindicated literature to fill the silent gaps of history (2009, 13).

Grenville based her novel on the life of her ancestor Solomon Wiseman, a story that she heard from her mother, where stereotypes of the exiled convict, the brave pioneer and the myth of the first contact between settlers and Aboriginal people converge. She situates her novel as “an imaginative supplement to the historical record” (Mitchell 2010b, 258), endorsing the Postmodern idea that both history and fiction can contribute to the reconstruction of the past, as they have the same origins as discourses (Mitchell 2010b, 254). Family history transmitted from parents to children in the form of cultural memory becomes fundamental in the re-writing of the past. This past which is fragmented, discontinuous and often traumatic is reconstructed through a counter-history that has been inherited through acts of remembrance, which can be visual, verbal or bodily acts. In this sense, the story of the individual told by oral narrative, fiction, film, testimony or performance represents a challenge to official mainstream history (Hirsch and Smith 2002, 7, 10).

In this context of British settlers and Aboriginal confrontations, I view Eckart Voights-Virchow’s use of the concept of cultural and subcultural hermeneutics as a very appropriate tool for the analysis of historical difference and otherness. In his words, “[t]he aim of cultural hermeneutics is to arrive at an understanding as a result of historical processes by analysing historical narratives, both fictional and non-fictional” (Voights-Virchow 2009, 108). This applies to neo-Victorian fiction as novels which are populated by characters that are outside mainstream culture and fall into the category of the other, having their counterparts in our contemporary world. And this certainly can be said of neo-Victorian novels like The Secret River which aim to rewrite and reconstruct a colonial past where Aboriginal people can be identified as the other. At the same time, the white coloniser is perceived as the other in the natives’ minds, so that these two processes of othering are difficult to reconcile in the narrative.

To this scenario we can add Elizabeth Ho’s view of postcolonial theory as a memorial practice. In her opinion, neo-Victorianism can offer a mode to think about history in a different way so that it can be made accountable to the present (Ho 2012, 16). She resorts to Paul Gilroy’s notion of “postcolonial melancholia” that she describes as the situation of “a post-imperial Britain unwilling and unable to face the loss of national greatness and prestige” (Ho 2012, 17). She continues to emphasise the importance of memory and trauma culture as central elements in the process of recovery, and for obtaining justice and political and economic reparation for the victims of imperialism in a postcolonial world (Ho 2012, 17).

Thus, the central issue is negotiating colonial identities to redefine “foreignness” and “otherness” not only in a British context, but also in a globalised context that includes aspects such as representation, power, gender, sexuality and subalternity (Khair 2009, 9, 11). The ghost of a colonial past haunts our postcolonial presents, and neo-Victorian fiction gives voice to the “subaltern other” to write back to Empire, contesting new imperialism and spheres of influence. Focusing on the idea of globalisation, the influence of the British Empire goes beyond its borders, with neo-Victorianism becoming part of a global politics; thus, its trans-national aspect questions narrow Western or even Anglophone interpretations embracing a plurality of attitudes, contexts and mindsets which include the former colonies (Primorac and Pietrzak-Franger 2015, 1–4). In this sense, Said’s travelling theory gains strength in my argument as, according to him, ideas and theories travel from person to person, situation to situation or one period to another. Therefore, it is important to discern if these ideas or theories can become relevant when they travel from one culture to another, and neo-Victorianism is an example of this conceptual framework (1983, 226–227). Behind this idea of contemporary globalisation and the presence of Anglocentrism in economic and cultural power relations lies the possibility of also looking at Britain’s imperial past as a global context where the boundaries between territories blur in the exchange of commodities and people. In this way, the relationship between the empire’s periphery and centre is subverted and inverted by contemporary literary representations in neo-Victorian fiction that engage with areas such as Australasia, India and East Asia (Llewellyn and Heilmann 2013, 28).

However, as neo-Victorian fiction, the novel also conveys a double meaning in the reflection of Empire and power relations into our contemporary postcolonial western civilisation and into the relationships between developed and emerging countries. Therefore, some issues converge in the analysis of the novel. Firstly, historical difference and otherness come to the fore as neo-Victorian fiction is concerned with cultural hermeneutics and the re-writing of the Victorian past; as a consequence, the British Empire as part of the Victorian culture becomes a trope to be analysed from the prism of postcolonial theory, establishing a relationship with notions of imperialism and new imperialism that are concomitant with contemporary globalisation. Secondly, the encounter between the colonisers and the colonised and the violence and confrontations this encounter brought along can be considered as paradigmatic of the situations of vulnerability and precarity that ensued.

Therefore, the aim of this chapter is to analyse the way in which the early Australian settlement contributed to the creation of an English identity based on the experience of colonisation, which was not the same according to gender differences. This identity has always been associated with civilisation and progress and with white supremacy, but the novel inverts this notion, invoking sympathy for both parties, the colonisers and the colonised, under situations of precarity and vulnerability. Thus, following Judith Butler’s theories, I will argue that both sides became involved in a relationship of mutual vulnerability, where gender becomes an identity marker. In what follows next, my discussion will be organised around two main topics: Australian history and narratives of recollection, and gender identity and vulnerability both in white settlers and Indigenous communities.

2 Historical Recollection, Gender and Vulnerability in The Secret River

Feminism and neo-Victorianism have in common their belief that looking back can help to move forward. Our contemporary sexual politics, the same as the Victorian one, have been determined by contradictory notions of womanhood, feminism and gender performance. In this sense, current debates about whether feminism and society have made progress or have fallen behind or whether hierarchies have suffered any change become relevant (MacDonald and Goggin 2013, 3–4). Grenville’s feminism is concerned with a view of the world in terms of sex, gender and power, more than an ideology that can help us understand it (Sheridan 2010, 1).

Some of these issues are reflected in the narrative in the relationship between Thornhill and his wife Sal. Water is present in The Secret River not only in the voyage as a convict of William Thornhill and his family on board the Alexander, a convict ship that transported them from their homeland to His Majesty’s colony of New South Wales in 1806, but also as the medium for their survival through trade with other settlers and convicts. These convicts had found in Australia the place where to prosper and start a new life by claiming ownership of a plot of land, and this is what the Thornhills did. They arrived in Sidney, known at the time as The Camp, but the harsh experience of travelling on board a convict ship had kept Mr. and Mrs. Thornhill separated. Mr. Thornhill caught sight of his second son for the first time, his wife and his first child having been in the darkness of the hold the whole of the journey. Convicts and free people occupied different spaces on board the ship. He had worked for different masters pulling an oar: “It made little difference whether the water on which he did it was called the Thames or Sydney Cove” (Grenville 2005a, 85). After that he could obtain his “ticket of leave” which meant that he could benefit from his own work while still being a prisoner. He could even take a piece of land to call his, but he could not leave the colony until he was given the pardon which came after five years; the Thornhills’ aim was to work and save money to return to England. For instance, the fact that she becomes his master as a convict in Australia calls the reader’s attention. Masters had total power over servants, even over life and death, so Sal, who was a free immigrant, had immense power over her husband legally and morally, thus inverting gender roles. It was not always common that the wives of convicts sentenced to transportation travelled with them and their families. However, Sal shows her determination to travel and be bound together with her husband as it would be considered her moral obligation according to patriarchy. We find here a tension between her public status as a free/mistress and her private one as wife being unfree/subject. Sal is a very strong woman, travelling while pregnant and delivering her child on a ship. She continued to be her husband’s support till old age, although their relationship was estranged by different views on colonial and family matters, as we shall see.

Land and water would determine their future, so Thornhill decided to buy a small boat, The Hope, to make a living, “[w]ith such a small boat he would have to work in a small way, but if he owned it himself he would do well enough not to have to thieve. He would make a good steady living, nothing grand, but reliable” (Grenville 2005a, 119). But he also chose a plot of land where to settle with his family as “[a]ll a person need do was find a place no one had already taken. Plant a crop, build a hut, call the place Smith’s or Flanagan’s, and out-stare anyone who said otherwise” (Grenville 2005a, 125). This piece of land, Thornhill’s Point, was close to the Hawkesbury, a river difficult to find which he navigated with the Hope.

In the novel, the Hawkesbury River represents a place where narratives of the Australian past remain submerged. It is a trope of movement and incursion of settlers to have access to reaches of land while at the same time they intrude in the lives of the Indigenous population whose lives are disturbed. The river becomes a contradictory example of chance and annihilation. It also becomes a “contact zone” where encounters between different cultures and clashing ideas about property come into conflict (Kossew 2007, 13). According to Mary Louise Pratt, “contact zones” are “social spaces where disparate cultures meet, clash, and grapple with each other, often in highly asymmetrical relations of domination and subordination” (2003, 4). Australian frontiers became “contact zones” in this sense where mutual understanding was nearly impossible as natives and colonisers spoke very different languages, both in a literal and metaphorical way. But “contact zones” also lead us to a double perspective, because the novel tries to give voice to Aboriginal Australians and write their history as one of destruction and dispossession. At the same time, the narrative asks for empathy towards the English settlers who were evicted from their homeland and had to build a new life in a hostile distant territory. To reach a balance between both narratives is a really difficult task to do for Grenville, being herself a descendant of the colonisers. Thus, stories of the first contact on the Hawkesbury are full of violence, division, lack of understanding, suffering and fear (Collins 2010, 169).

After being chartered by Thomas Cook, Australia had become a penal colony where felons condemned to transportation could settle and participate in a kind of free system to alleviate the “excess” of convict population in the metropolis: this continent would come to replace the American colonies after their loss (Said 1994, xvi). Therefore, Australia became a kind of Purgatory for English felons, giving them the possibility of returning to the metropolis. The problem was that this land was occupied by natives, Aborigines that were identified by white settlers as “savages”:

[…] everyone knew the blacks did not plant things. They wandered about, taking food as it came under their hand. They might grub things out of the dirt if they happened on them, or pick something of a bush as they passed. But, like children, they did not plant today so that they could eat tomorrow. It was why they were called savages. (Grenville 2005a, 146)

The lack of “civilisation” in the native population of colonised territories like Australia was the main reason behind colonisation. Natives were treated as children because of their unfamiliarity with Western customs and rules. The justification of the taking of the land from the Aborigines was based on the British project of creating an Empire while simultaneously bringing progress and Western values to the native population. In fact, “imperialism is a system” where “[l]ife in one subordinate realm of experience is imprinted by the fictions and follies of the dominant realm”, but at the same time “experience in the dominant society comes to depend uncritically on natives and their territories perceived as in need of la mission civilisatrice” (Said 1994, xxi; text italics). We learn in the novel about the atrocities committed by the natives against the white settlers, thoroughly publicised by the Gazette, the local newspaper: crops being devastated, children being cruelly killed, or women being robbed. This information gives the reader the white perspective, but settlers were the ones who committed atrocities against the Aborigines.

Despite Grenville’s dedicatory to “the Aboriginal people of Australia: past, present and future”, the story is mostly told through Thornhill’s perceptions, which made the novel’s reception by readers and historians controversial. He initially tries to communicate with the natives when they come close to his property but they do not speak the same language, and gestures are not enough to make them understand: “He bent down and with a twig drew marks on the dust: a curving line that was the river, and a tidy square representing his own hundred acres. This mine now. Thornhill’s place. […] You got all the rest, Thornhill said” (Grenville 2005a, 203; text italics). He does not make any further effort to understand his neighbours, who are in fact the dispossessed, and expects them to share his own views on life. Sal’s attitude to the Aborigines is utterly different. Despite Victorian notions of gender, Thornhill describes her as “a stubborn intelligence as unyielding as a rock” (Grenville 2005a, 70). She becomes accustomed to the natives’ ways and shows empathy towards them, revealing an emotional intelligence that her husband lacks. Her stance can lead to mutual understanding: “But like everything else that was peculiar here, Scabby Bill’s nakedness soon became ordinary. She grew used to him calling at her and would tear a bit off the loaf to give him” (Grenville 2005a, 94). In contrast with his wife, Thornhill finds the Aborigines’ behaviour representative of their lack of “civilisation”; for example, he does not understand how their women can move around almost naked, the same as the men themselves. However, it is only when he feels his life and the lives of his wife and children are threatened that he changes his attitude towards the “savages”, that is, he becomes vulnerable. It is after a time living by the Hawkesbury that he perceives the natives’ presence and how they are gathering in the area around his hut and his plot of land, which he interprets as a menace:

It took them some time to realise that a crowd of blacks was gathering on the point. They came down from the ridges in twos and threes, the men walking in that deliberate way they had, burdened only with a few spears. The women came after, each with a baby on her hip and a long bag hanging from her forehead down her back. Others came in canoes, drifting up or down the river with the tide, the little slips of bark holding a man and a woman, with a child between, and the water by some miracle not coming in over the gunwale. (Grenville 2005a, 247)

Aborigines’ customs and traditions are described in this passage as uncivilised but at the same time the people are defined as dexterous in their crafts and clever in the way they organise themselves as a group, with gender roles similar to those of the English. As stated above, not only the land, but also water, the river, is the fluid medium that becomes the contact zone between the natives and the settlers, that liminal zone of the first encounter.

The fight for the land makes both parties vulnerable as both feel the threat of the other’s power, although “It is a well-attested fact that the blacks have no word for property” (Grenville 2005a, 270; text italics). Thornhill and his family feel especially threatened when they can hear the rituals of their native neighbours:

At first it was a sharp clapping, insistent as a heartbeat. […] Before he could think of reassurance, the singing started: a high strong wailing of a man’s voice, and other voice in a kind of drone underneath. It was not a tune, nothing cheerful that you might listen to like Oranges and Lemons, more a kind of chant as you might hear in a church. It was a sound that worked its way under the skin. (Grenville 2005a, 250)

Settlers perceived cultural difference as a threat. Here ideas of vulnerability become very convenient to describe confrontations on both sides, establishing a contrast between native strategies and white ignorance which sometimes make of the colonisers the weaker party. However, it is the native people of Australia that first come under the predicament of Butler’s notion of precarity. According to this, the lives and deaths of all the people whose destinies are not a matter of concern because they belong to the category of the subaltern and the other do not deserve public mourning. They cannot be labelled under the category of human as they are under the control of regimes of power (Butler 2006, 19–49). The colonies were regimes of power under the control of white men reproducing those of the metropolis and other parts of Empire in a global unifying manner. This spirit still lies behind current new forms of imperialism. Metropolitan centres have always aspired to have global dominance and have put forward the same number of reasons that can be reduced to a “national interest in running the affairs of lesser peoples”, believing themselves exceptional (Said 1994, xxv–xxvi). This is the reason why Hardt and Negri talk about globalisation in terms of a new empire:

War, suffering, misery, and exploitation increasingly characterise our globalising world. There are so many reasons to seek refuge in a realm “outside,” some place separate from the discipline and control of today’s emerging Empire or even some transcendent or transcendental principles and values that can guide our lives and ground our political action. One primary effect of globalisation, however, is the creation of a common world, a world that, for better or worse, we all share, a world that has no “outside”. (2009, vii)

The suffering, misery and exploitation of colonialism are replicated in new forms of Empire in our postcolonial world that shares the same principles and values.

The tensions between both groups come to a head when a Proclamation by the Governor is published in the Gazette in 1814 hardening the measures against the Aborigines who commit crimes against the white population. Thornhill and his fellow men decide to fight the natives in order not to lose their land; he realises that the Aborigines are the true owners of the land and that they are also ready to fight. In this horrible confrontation, there is devastation in both parties: “The sun hardened around them. The clearing had a broken look, the bodies lying like so much fallen timber, the dirt trampled and marked with dark stains. And a great shocked silence hanging over everything” (Grenville 2006, 323). This quote tells us about one of the biggest massacres in the history of the relationship between white colonisers and native Australians.

Blackwood’s massacre as described in the narrative marks a turning point in the relationship between Thornhill and Sal. Before the event, all his actions had been driven by the love for his wife and her support, but in the second half of the novel, Thornhill’s behaviour is determined by his love for the land. He does not follow Sal’s wishes to avoid violence, and a great silence, symbolising the silence of the historical record, comes between them, changing their relationship for ever (Collins 2010, 177). He rejects his ethical role as a witness of trauma in connection with this atrocious massacre of Aborigines as he would do in other similar situations of violence, especially when it comes to acknowledging his participation in these kinds of events with his wife Sal (Mitchell 2010b, 261). Nonetheless, the author calls for the contemporary reader’s role to be a witness of massacres, which makes them feel unable to identify with Thornhill’s position. In his words, “[t]he thing about having things unspoken between two people, […], was that when you had set your foot along that path it was easier to go on than to go back” (Grenville 2006, 160). He is torn between the idea of the “good settler” represented by Tom Blackwood and the “evil one” embodied by Saggity Birtles or Smasher Sullivan, who was a rapist and murderer, occupying a middle ground. However, he is closer to Smasher’s attitude when he gets involved in the massacre out of the fear to lose his land and of the possibility of his family being killed by an Aboriginal attack (Gall 2008, 100). This again provokes contradictory reactions in the reader when trying to have feelings of empathy towards our protagonist.

Australian history is full of events like this, and silence about the massacre is connected with the so-called history wars. These make reference to the fact that Australian historians occupy conflicting positions regarding the account of the early settlements. The arena of contention is focused on the extent to which settler violence against the native population happened and in what ways Indigenous people can be compensated for their suffering and loss (Radstone 2013, 288). In other words, it is important to establish the degree of accountability of white Australians for these dreadful episodes from the past. In fact, these episodes are known as Australia’s River of Blood, since W.E.H. Stanner had used this expression in a lecture in 1968. He alluded to the massacres of the Northern Rivers committed by the white settlers between 1838 and 1870 devastating the Aboriginal population who showed resistance (Herrero 2014, 88). This issue began to be discussed in the public arena in 2005, together with the forced removal of Aboriginal children to be brought up by white families which continued till the 1970s2 (Mitchell 2010b, 265, 267). Grenville accuses the white Australians of the lack of sympathy towards the Indigenous population through her protagonist Thornhill. As stated above, this marked his relationship with his wife Sal, who had shown more empathy towards her Aboriginal neighbours. This transforms their relationship in one of silences between them, as she does not share her husband’s attitude. Thus, that complicity that they used to have as sweethearts and partners at the beginning of the tale is transformed, but she becomes complicit again when she looks the other way in the face of massacres against the Indigenous population. She keeps this attitude to ensure her security and that of her family, fulfilling the role of protection characteristic of the female gender at the time. She says, “I hope you ain’t done nothing, […] on account of me pushing at you” (Grenville 2005a, 323).

Massacres are concerned with the violence exerted on the most vulnerable populations by those in power, being a despicable practice. The desire for territory and power continues to exist connected with a nationalist and imperialist enterprise. This new colonialism is about the process of replacing old authority by new authority; colonial identity has become dynamic but according to Said “[t]hroughout the exchange between Europeans and their ‘others’ that began systematically half a millennium ago, the one idea that has scarcely varied is that there is an ‘us’ and a ‘them’, each quite settled, clear, unassailably self-evident” (1994, xxviii). In other words, the equation continues to be colonisers versus colonised.

Just before Blackwood’s massacre, Thornshill’s character becomes more aggressive and his love for the land more passionate, opposing the idea of relinquishing the land to the natives during a confrontation with his wife. It is the first and only time that he exerts gender violence against Sal:

Damn your eyes, he shouted. We ain’t going anywhere. His arm moved up and his hand opened itself out, almost of its own accord, to strike her. She looked at him, as his hand raised, with something like astonishment. He saw that she did not recognise him. Some violent man was pulling at her, shouting at her, the stranger with the heart of her husband. (Grenville 2005a, 303; text italics)

In the face of adversity, Sal shows determination to protect her family and to reconstruct her idea of home as “a refuge from the wilderness beyond” (Kossew 2007, 12) throughout the narrative, in contrast with her husband, who is being trapped by his thirst of territory, becoming a violent settler under the pretence of bringing “civilisation” to “primitive” people under the veil of colonisation.

However, my contention in this chapter is to assert that both Aborigines and settlers in Australia during the colonial regime were examples of vulnerability, that is, mutual vulnerability existed in a scenario where there was danger of extinction in both the colonising and colonised populations. Thornhill shows himself vulnerable when “he felt fear cold on his skin at the picture in his mind of them preparing their spears with a butcher’s glee, how sharp they were, how quick they would kill a white man” (Grenville 2005a, 251). At the same time, the Aborigines are the victims of the violence of Empire as when Thornhill can discern “a black woman, cringing against the wall, panting so he could see the teeth gleaming in her pained mouth, and the sores where the chain had chafed, red jewels against her black skin” (Grenville 2006, 262). This woman is the victim of sadistic colonisers represented by characters like Smasher in the novel. Not only is she the prey of gender and sexual violence but also the target of racial discrimination being enslaved by a cruel white settler. Thornhill does not help her or tell Sal about the violence and abuse this native woman suffers, doing nothing. This becomes another silence between them, echoing “the great Australian silence:” “Imagining the moment of telling Sal about what he had seen […] filled him with shame. […] Thinking the thought, saying the words, would make him the same as Smasher […] He had done nothing to help her. Now the evil of it was part of him” (Grenville 2005a, 264). He knew that Sal would disapprove.

With her retelling of the River of Blood story, Grenville hopes to provoke critical awareness and affect in the Australian white population. Since the 1988 commemorations of the bicentenary of white settlement, a public debate had been going on about what answer could be given to the devastation that the Aboriginal population had suffered. It was considered necessary to apologise and compensate the natives for the loss of their land and the violence inflicted on them. Eventually, apologies were offered to the Aboriginal people by the Prime Minister in 2008, but not by the Commonwealth Parliament, which was an obstacle for reconciliation. This happened a few years later and after in 1997 the United Nations had declared a genocide the treatment of native children that had been forcibly removed from their families. Grenville prompts the white reader to abjure forgetting and to empathise with the victims of colonial violence, enacting a double temporality between the colonial past and the postcolonial present (Mitchell 2010b, 266–269).

Arriving at an understanding of difference through history is the aim of cultural hermeneutics. Thornhill himself thinks Aborigines are people of a highly sophisticated nature and with fewer prejudices and better ways to enjoy life despite being considered inferior and childish by their white counterparts:

It was true the blacks made no fields or fences and built no houses worth the name, roaming around with no thought for the morrow. It was true that they did not even know enough to cover their nakedness, but sat with bare arses on the dirt like dogs. In all these ways they were nothing but savages.

On the other hand, they did not seem to have to work to come by the little they needed. They spent time every day filling their dishes and catching the creatures that hung from their belts. But afterwards they seemed to have plenty of time left for sitting by their fires talking and laughing and stroking the chubby limbs of their babies. (Grenville 2005a, 237)

Thus, where is civilisation to be found and who counts as human? Thornhill finishes his days being a rich man, but instead of feeling triumphant, he feels unease like the Australian country feels about frontiers still existing between whites and natives. He has a sense of loss and lamentation in old age since possession is not the same as belonging, a sensation that only the Aboriginal people of Australia can rightfully have (Pinto 2010, 182). At the end of the story, white triumph is tainted with guilt and responsibility for the violent past as “Thornhill comes to see something of the history he has participated in, the injustices he has perpetrated” (McCreden 2007, 23). Arriving at a mutual understanding is the desirable outcome of this story of mutual vulnerability and violence against Australian Indigenous people. In Grenville’s words: “Writing The Secret River was the opening of a new set of eyes in my head, a new set of ears. Now I could see what was underneath, what was always underneath and always will be: the shape of the land, the place itself, and the spirit of the people who were here” (2006, 221).

3 Conclusions

Grenville wants to contribute to the history of Indigenous Australians by adding aspects and details that are missing in the official record so that white Australians become involved in remembering the past of violence and destruction in which they took part. She wanted to write a fiction about the Aboriginal history of vulnerability that had been silenced coinciding with the 1988 celebrations of two hundred years of white settlement. But besides the official commemoration, a counter celebration took place with a traditional Aboriginal assembly to remember native history and culture as well as Indigenous survival. The idea was to awaken national consciousness and to provoke an ethical response (Mitchell 2010b, 265–266). Australian politicians are still fighting to close the gap between the white and the Indigenous population who represent a 3% of the total population of the country today. The Aboriginal population still suffers high levels of disadvantage, especially in the fields of child mortality, school attendance, literacy and numeracy, employment and life expectancy. Australia’s Prime Minister Scott Morrison considers that the country has “to grapple with the consequences of 2.25 centuries of Indigenous disempowerment” and that this task is a shared responsibility that must take into account “the viewpoint of Indigenous Australians” (“Closing the Gap”). Morrison’s implication in the Aboriginal cause is best exemplified in his appointment in 2019 of Ken Wyat as the country’s minister for Indigenous Australians, the first Aboriginal person ever to hold the role.

To conclude, throughout this chapter, I have proved that Kate Grenville’s novel The Secret River can be analysed as an example of neo-Victorian fiction where Postcolonial issues converge. Australian natives and white colonisers in the narrative reproduce a story of Empire and people trying to either conquer or keep the land. The novel is an invitation to understand both sides as there are no winners.

The Empire was at one of its most important stages during the nineteenth century, and particularly during Queen Victoria’s reign. In this sense, neo-Victorian fiction can be also understood as memory and re-writing of Empire, which was a central concern for Victorians. However, new forms of Empire through what are known as spheres of influence affect our contemporary international panorama where former colonies are still under the veiled control of old imperial powers. Both English and Aboriginal identities are described and put forward for the reader to explore: the whites as civilised, the natives as “the other”. But Grenville turns the story upside down trying to demonstrate that both the natives living in Australia and the convicts sent there as a punishment for their crimes are worthy of sympathy and affect as they all were victims of a global politics of Empire which persists today. Both identities, that of the colonisers and that of the colonised, are reasserted in a fight to keep the land where the gender perspective is added, as native women are not only the victims of dispossession but also of gender and sexual violence. Both parties become vulnerable living in precarious conditions leading to a state of mutual vulnerability, while simultaneously showing resistance and agency. However, traditional gender traits are reassessed as through Sal we can see women can be strong and have clear notions of what is right or wrong. Also, women natives can be seen in the novel as examples of victims of sexual and racial discrimination at the hands of English colonisers with white women having a complaisant attitude on some occasions. In this sense, this neo-Victorian novel writes back to Empire contesting traditional interpretations of the past, questioning the notion of British identity as an imperial civilising one, and reflecting global interpretations of contemporary forms of imperial power where gender views mark a difference.

In her performance of cultural memory through fiction, Grenville represents and reinterprets the Australian River of Blood as an experience of recollection and transmission through gendered paradigms. By presenting national counter-memories, she makes an attempt to produce a national identity that reinscribes forgotten stories and questions common assumptions to provide Aboriginal victims with restitution. In this way, she positions her historical fiction as a memory text, haunting the white Australian identity and establishing connections with the present and the future.

Notes

  1. 1.

    The idea of “The Great Australian Silence” was coined by Prof. W.H. Stanner in his Boyer lectures given in 1968 under the title of After Dreaming, where he referred to “a secret river of blood in Australian history”. In fact, what he meant was that there is a history of colonial violence that has been silenced and is associated with “a national cult of disremembering” (Kossew 2007, 8).

  2. 2.

    A report entitled The Stolen Generation was published in 1980 to bring to light the crime that continued till the 1970s committed against Aboriginal families whose children were removed from their parents and taken to white families (Mitchell 2010b, 265).