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‘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?’
Kate Grenville is no stranger to the past. Her success and fame as a writer exploded when she published The Secret River in 2005, a bestseller based on the story of her convict ancestor, an early settler on the Hawkesbury River.
More than two decades on, and following the defeat of the Voice referendum, Grenville is still grappling with what it means to descend from people who were, as she puts it, “on the sharp edge of the moving blade that was colonisation”.
So she decides to go on a kind of pilgrimage, back through the places her family stories happened, and put the stories and the First People back into the same frame, on the same country, to try to think about those questions.
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‘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?’
Kate Grenville is no stranger to the past. Her success and fame as a writer exploded when she published The Secret River in 2005, a bestseller based on the story of her convict ancestor, an early settler on the Hawkesbury River.
More than two decades on, and following the defeat of the Voice referendum, Grenville is still grappling with what it means to descend from people who were, as she puts it, “on the sharp edge of the moving blade that was colonisation”.
So she decides to go on a kind of pilgrimage, back through the places her family stories happened, and put the stories and the First People back into the same frame, on the same country, to try to think about those questions.
Kate Grenville is an icon of Australian literature. Her best-known work, The Secret River, fictionalises her family history, telling the story of a convict and his settlement in Sydney. In Unsettled, Grenville tries to tell the true, nonfiction story of her ancestors, navigating her place as a non-Indigenous Australian living on and benefitting from stolen land. She travels across Australia, contextualising each member of her family in time and place, and disrupting the colonial assumptions she has made about these times and places. Her family and First Nations people are put in the same frame – her family’s placement across the country has always required the displacement of Indigenous peoples.
However, Grenville is a novelist, not a historian. While she relies on the work of many historians and Indigenous oral histories, she is also interested in the practice of storytelling itself. She constantly interrogates language and how it works to create a narrative about Australia’s past – our passive voice, evasions, under-exaggerations, legal fictions and personal abstractions. Engaging in reparative reading practises, she speculates about history between and underneath the archives: ‘Even to speculate is a reminder that the white people’s side of the story is the only one we hear.’
This book serves as a reminder that Australian history, Aboriginal history, is not an abstract element on a curriculum or plaque. It is personal – every non-Indigenous person living in Australia has benefitted from the brutal genocide of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders. Even though we did not wield the weapons, we are reaping what these weapons, and the people holding them, sowed. The Voice to Parliament was an opportunity for us to take a step towards a better future, and we rejected it. What can we, as individuals, do now instead? Grenville does not pretend to provide any answers, but in understanding how much we have stolen, we can perhaps start to understand how much there is still to do.
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In conversation
Tuesday 1 April, 6.00pm
Cinema Nova, 380 Lygon St, Carlton VIC 3053
Join us to hear Kate Grenville in conversation as she discusses her new book Unsettled
Before you see them at the festival, pickup these insightful works of nonfiction from the guests of the 2025 Melbourne Writers Festival – a cosmic combination of local and international writers!
Kate Grenville is one of Australia's most celebrated writers. Her international bestseller The Secret River was awarded local and overseas prizes, has been adapted for the stage and as an acclaimed television miniseries, and is now a much-loved classic.
