Kate Grenville crouches down on a rock on Sydney’s lower north shore, feet bare, next to a Cammeraygal engraving of a whale. The writer is careful not to trespass on the art. “You can just see the little figure,” she says, pointing to a faint outline of a mysterious tiny human with outstretched arms and legs in the leviathan’s belly.
Ten-year-old Kate was first brought to this coastal Waverton site on a school excursion almost 65 years ago, but remembered only the big whale, not the little human. “The whole thing was kind of trivialised,” she says. “The [whale] outline was picked out in this white Dulux gloss, so I was astonished when I came back and realised there was a figure inside.”
Reaching for her bag on the timber boardwalk to fetch a cloth sunhat on this cloudy April morning, Grenville returns to the rock to absorb the presence of this etched human, who is perhaps an Indigenous knowledge keeper. Grenville, now 74, has just been on her own knowledge quest to grapple with a violent history from which many other non-Indigenous Australians have kept their eyes averted.
First, she drove once again to the familiar “claustrophobic” valley of Wisemans Ferry on the Hawkesbury River, where her England-born great-great-great grandfather, transported convict Solomon Wiseman, “took up” land shortly after being freed, according to the wording of family lore that took no account of Indigenous dispossession.
Clues to Wiseman’s character were contained in unconfirmed rumours he killed his first wife, Jane, the mother of his six children, by pushing her down some stairs or off a balcony, accidentally or otherwise. In 2005, Grenville published her bestseller novel The Secret River, in which she fictionalised Wiseman as William Thornhill, speculating he took up a gun and shot Dharug people, and in 2015, the story became a milestone television miniseries, vividly depicting Thornhill’s part in an Aboriginal massacre.
I tell Grenville I was on set when the massacre was filmed, deeply moved by those scenes and the leadership of actor Trevor Jamieson, a Spinifex man who encouraged the rest of the Indigenous actors to hug the non-Indigenous actors after the director called cut. “What generosity,” she says. “I remember when I wrote the massacre scene – I generally do 25 drafts – but that scene I wrote once, as though I was writing with my face averted, and I never revised it: I couldn’t bear to look at it again.”
Now, Grenville has been looking deeply at the landscape, and what lies beneath. As she documents in her new nonfiction book Unsettled: A Journey Through Time and Place, she recently drove northward of Wiseman’s Ferry, up through Tamworth, getting out of her car to walk at length wherever land was not “fiercely fenced”, to better understand the journey of her forebears after Wiseman, but also more deeply consider the devastation wrought on the Dharug, Darkinjung, the Wonnarua, the Gomeroi peoples and so on up the line of colonisation.
“I think this book is a kind of homemade, DIY truth-telling and I think that many people could do a version of that,” she says. “Mine is a particular version because I happen to have the ancestors that went back, but everybody lives on a little bit of Aboriginal land. One of the things that people could do is to find out exactly what happened on that land before, who it belonged to, and really own that.”
We take a walk now, down past gums and grevillea, through country inhabited by ringtail possums and bent-wing bats. We head towards the collapsing timber docks, topped by rusting steel, down to the disused coal loader building, which from the 1920s to 1970s operated as a harbourside site where coal was delivered, stockpiled and transferred.
Grenville is a keen and curious rambler, enquiring about the tunnels within the building, but she is quick to point out she is not here to venerate colonial industry. She climbs the metal stairs on the side of the coal loader, looking out across the working harbour, naval ships in dock and cargo vessels chugging along, but it is the landscape she loves.
“Oh, it’s beautiful, isn’t it?” she reflects. “I’m a top-of-the-hill person. I don’t like valleys much. Balls Head, you look out across the harbour in all directions, and it is a fabulous feeling of freedom and the beauty of country.”
Grenville’s soul-searching pilgrimage was spurred by the defeat of the referendum on the voice to parliament. She handed out how-to-vote cards for the yes side. “There was certainly racism, and plenty of it, but the overwhelming feeling I got was people didn’t know, they hadn’t been told, they hadn’t been taught,” she recalls now. “And as that fabulously effective slogan went, ‘If you don’t know, vote no’; in other words, it is OK to just go on in ignorance.”
We repair to a cafe closer to the whale engraving. Over a pot of tea, Grenville is warm and engaging, glowing in a newfound confidence of belonging in Australia after her journey.
In class at North Sydney Demonstration School, Grenville had certainly learned of the “exotic and picturesque” Aboriginal people, and was taught they were “nomads” without a connection to place, and that after the British came, they were exposed to deadly measles, flu and smallpox. Never did her teachers speak of the colonisers shooting the Indigenous people. It was only as an adult Grenville began to deconstruct her mother’s phrase that Solomon Wiseman “took up” his Hawkesbury land. “‘Took up’ – I mean, you take up a piece of unfinished knitting ... you’re doing something good.”
Recent reading and conversations with Indigenous people have helped Grenville gain a deeper appreciation of Aboriginal culture, history, land management and resistance. In the new book, she describes first Australians as “patriots defending their homelands”, eschewing the mythologies taught during her childhood.
In Unsettled, Grenville has prised apart the language non-Indigenous Australians use to tell our history. Now, she would like non-Indigenous Australians to be known as “balanda” – a word the seafaring Macassan traders brought to the north coast of Australia, derived from Hollander, used to describe the Dutch colonists in Indonesia then taken up by some Aboriginal peoples here.
“I think the phrase ‘non-Indigenous Australian’ is not only cumbersome and awkward to say but it suggests we don’t need a special name, that we are the default from which everybody else is a kind of aberration,” says Grenville, who today lives in Melbourne’s North Fitzroy. “But we are not the default, we are not the norm.”
Noting Victoria is “ploughing ahead with the Yoorook Justice Commission”, Grenville believes the “balanda” across Australia must sit down with Indigenous Australians to deeply listen to truth, to aim for a “treaty or some kind of negotiated agreement”.
In the “great humming silence of landscape”, Grenville writes in Unsettled, “I know how little I really belong.” But now, she is feeling more confidence in her place, and radiates a sense of peace.
“I’m recognising the way in which I don’t belong; that sounds kind of paradoxical, but I don’t have to pretend any more because I recognise that my sort of belonging is a particular sort of belonging, and if you are an Indigenous person, that’s a different kind of belonging.
“The challenge is to come together and find a way those two sorts of belongings can live side by side without the sense one has to crush the other.”
• Unsettled: A Journey Through Time and Place by Kate Grenville, published by Black Inc, is out now. Grenville will be a guest at Sydney writers’ festival in May.
