Kate Grenville was shortlisted for the Booker Prize for her last novel,

The Secret River,

a fictional exploration of early, fraught relations between the English colonists and the original inhabitants of Australia. In

The Lieutenant,

she revisits this territory. Mark Rubbo spoke to her for Readings on the eve of its publication.

A reviewer of

I hope there’s lots to ponder over politically in the stories I tell, but that’s not primarily why I write them. The driving passion behind The Lieutenant and The Secret River was to try to wriggle inside specific characters and specific moments, not abstract ideas – the book is about the human, emotional reality of a situation. The book tells the story of the friendship between a First Fleet soldier and a young Aboriginal girl, and what unforeseen paths that friendship takes them down. I’ve tried to inhabit the nuances and puzzles of that situation, so that the reader can inhabit it too.

The book was inspired by real events and real people; what was the story and when did you come across it?

The book was inspired by the friendship between William Dawes, a First Fleet marine, and Patyegarang, a young Gadigal girl. Remarkably, their friendship is recorded in notebooks Dawes kept – he was learning Patyegarang’s language, and wrote down, word-for-word, entire conversations between himself and her. Between the lines of these conversations, an extraordinary relationship positively blazes off the page – affectionate, respectful, and full of humour. In spite of all the gulfs of race, sex, and culture between them, these two people seem to have really enjoyed each other’s company. For Dawes, it appears to have been a transforming experience – in the course of his friendship with Patyegarang, he was forced to make a choice that altered the whole direction of his life.

I came across these notebooks when I was researching The Secret River and the tone of those conversations went through me like a blade – I thought, this is a moment in our shared history that I really want to try to understand. Who were these two people? What does it mean, that such a friendship was possible?

You describe the central character, Rooke, as a genius who has trouble relating to people. It sounds a bit like a diagnosis of aspersers or is that just coincidental?

At the beginning of the novel, Rooke is a bit of an eighteenth-century geek – a whizz at maths and astronomy and languages – and yes, he’s pretty awkward with people. But I don’t see him as having Asperger’s – he’s just a rather nerdy guy who hasn’t been lucky enough to find any fellow-souls. I see him as a young man who feels deeply, just not in the expected ways. All the potential for a full emotional life is there, and over the course of the story it emerges.

It’s through his friendship with his colleague, Silk, that Rooke starts to engage a bit with the outside world. What quality did Silk have to enable him to do this?

Silk pays Rooke the great compliment of accepting him as he is. Silk can do that because he’s a man completely at ease with himself – he doesn’t need to be defensive or judgemental. Silk is also a superb social animal – charming, witty, gregarious – and Rooke is clever enough to watch how he does it and learn a few things. When the two of them go through a scarifying battle experience together, that makes a bond that goes far beyond any differences of temperament. I found Silk a fascinating character to write – he’s a pragmatist, always with an eye out for his own advantage, and a ruthless gleaner of other people’s stories for his ‘narrative’ – and yet he’s a man of generosity and largeness of spirit. His contradictions, like Rooke’s, made him hard to get a handle on (part of the reason this book went through 30 drafts), but very rewarding to work away at.

Rooke’s precocious skills in mathematics lead him to the naval school where he becomes adept as an astronomer and navigator; your descriptions of these appear so scientifically convincing – how did you research this?

I’m glad they seem convincing! I did a huge amount of research but I fear there are still plenty of mathematical and astronomical howlers. In order to write about such a man, I felt I had to try to understand the things he was passionate about, although I went into it with all the fears and prejudices of a maths-phobe who can barely add two plus two. I read about Ptolemy and Galileo, Kepler and Newton and found the way they gradually pieced together an understanding of the cosmos completely enthralling. (I had the advantage that I only had to deal with what was known in the late eighteenth-century: no relativity or string theory!)

Then I went out into the darkest nights I could find, with my faithful star chart, and looked. It was an extraordinary and moving realisation, that the stars I was looking at were exactly the same as the stars William Dawes, and through him Daniel Rooke, had looked at (allowing for precession, of course). Those cold hours of craning up at the sky seemed a necessary part of the process of coming to know him. It was more than just cold-blooded ‘research’, it felt like putting my own self aside in order to try to hear what his was saying.

There are elements of

I’m in awe of the human imagination – every individual taking in what’s gone before and adding his or her own speck to the great project of trying to understand. To try to write a novel is to pay homage with every word to all the writers whose words have changed you, like vitamins, at the molecular level.

In The Lieutenant, the homage I’m most conscious of paying is to the scientific imagination. What an astonishing leap it took, to see – against every instinct and the evidence of your eyes – that the earth moved around the sun and not the other way around! My understanding of mathematical and astronomical creativity is embarrassingly feeble, but what I’ve learned in writing this book is to be in awe of that kind of creativity, as well as the kind that produces painting and poetry.

When he arrives in New South Wales with the First Fleet, Rooke is, for the first time in his life, almost happy. His conversation with a fellow officer unsettles him – was it fair to spoil his fun?

Tim Winton says his rule of thumb with writing is that something bad has to happen by page ten, and I think he’s pretty right about that. A happy story is no story, unfortunately. I’m a bit slower off the mark than Tim, so my something bad doesn’t happen till about page 70, but the principle is the same. But of course, as well as something bad for a story to get moving, something good has to happen too. I spoil Rooke’s fun, but I think I finally give him something better.

A central element in the book is Rooke’s friendship with a young Aboriginal girl, Tagaran. It’s significant in many ways; his friend Silk, when he discovers it suggests that it may be sexual. What were you trying to do with that?

It’s a sad fact that it’s easier to imagine a sexual intimacy than any other kind. But in The Lieutenant that’s the challenge I had: to create an intimacy that was robust, deeply affectionate, humorous, and meaningful – and to make it not a sexual relationship. I felt that as a sexual relationship its power would be clouded: just another possibly exploitative intimacy between a colonising man and an indigenous woman. This was a transformative relationship for Rooke that went far beyond the physical.

Writing that was a real challenge – I had to try to convince the reader that Rooke had no sexual feelings for Tagaran, and it wasn’t that he was repressing or sublimating sexual impulses, either. Silk’s assumption – that Rooke was having a sexual relationship – would be a normal one, I thought, both for Rooke’s peers and for the reader, in spite of the fact that Tagaran is only 10 or 12. The scene gave me the chance to show what was really going on, which is that it’s never crossed Rooke’s mind to have any sexual thoughts about Tagaran. He’s written down conversations which could be interpreted sexually – but the very fact of having left a record of them demonstrates his innocence. A man with sex on his mind would never have written them down for others to see.

What Rooke and Tagaran share is a deep rapport of spirit. They recognise something in each other, and take pleasure in working together to shape their few shared words into conversations to bridge the impossible differences between them.

For me that was the heart of the book – to wonder at the fact that, 200 years ago, a British soldier and an Aboriginal girl really did have those conversations. The Secret River was a book about conversations closing down. Thornhill makes a choice that leads to a great silence. The Lieutenant is in some ways the mirror-image of that: it’s about the possibility of conversations opening up. Post-Apology, that seems to be where we are now in Australia – with the promise of conversations possible again.

The Aborigines are shadowy and mysterious figures at first, but emerge as the novel progresses. Were you tempted to give them voices earlier on?

Even before I started writing, I’d decided not to try to invent any dialogue for the indigenous people – I would use only what was in Dawes’ notebooks. Of course, I invented contexts for those conversations – the time, the place, the tone of voice – but I chose not to go beyond the words that had been recorded. That was one reason for keeping the Aborigines as shadowy figures at the start. The other is that, reading the historical record, you get a powerful impression of the frustration of the colonists – they wanted to start talking to the Indigneous people, but the Indigenous people were, on the whole, keeping their distance. In the end, of course, the governor ordered two men forcibly kidnapped, in the hope that a conversation might start that way.

So Rooke’s conversations with Tagaran are all the more extraordinary because of the context in which they take place. As Rooke says, the laws of time and place and consequence are suspended, while these two individuals together create something unique.

The Lieutenant is

I’d like the reader to be as powerfully drawn along, as I was in writing – to always be in the position of wondering why people are doing what they’re doing, and what’s going to become of them. As a writer, those questions are what keeps me going – I have to write the book to find out what happens and why. Yes, I do want to entertain – to try to seize the reader with the same passion I felt, and whirl them along as I was whirled, following these people into all their troubles and all their joys.