In early 19th century, poverty-stricken London, young tearaway William Thornhill works on the Thames as a lighterman, ferrying cargo and the landed gentry back and forth across the river.

His true love is a working-class girl called Sal, and, for a while, the two of them form a home together, and Thornhill believes all might be well, that he might escape the slums of London. But, following a chain of events culminating in Thornhill being captured for theft, he is spared the noose but transported to the new colony, Australia.

Thornhill arrives in New South Wales a prisoner, his wife and children in tow. Slowly but surely they begin to carve out a life for themselves in their new world, with the ever-present fear of the Aboriginals luring in the background.

The uncomfortable birth of a nation, the oppression of indigenous Australian peoples, the unstoppable expansion of capitalism, the male domination of women, and the temptations of power are the themes of Kate Grenville’s 2005 novel The Secret River.

While Thornhill comes from poverty and abuse, he loses no time in treating his own servants brusquely when he attains status to have them.

The slumdog with a heart of gold, wanting only to be a self-made man with a piece of the world he can call his own and his wife by his side, Thornhill unfortunately remains an under-drawn character throughout the novel. The almost cartoonish, mock-Dickensian poverty he endures as a child pass the reader by with little impact, as it seems to have little impact on the characters themselves. Both Sal and Thornhill lose their parents and siblings, who are never mentioned again in the novel. Episodes such as pissing on his own feet to keep them warm seem to have left little mark upon Thornhill. He is generically “strong”, “capable” and ”determined”, with none of the uncomfortable, messy complications of character that we find in real human beings. It is difficult to get a grasp on either his or his wife’s characters, a failing of Grenville’s writing.

What is clear is that Thornhill is a much less sympathetic character than the text initially suggests. Repeatedly lying to his wife, turning a blind eye to shocking violence done to the Aboriginal people (particularly women), moving his wife and family to a dangerous area and refusing to leave despite threats on their lives, Thornhill’s selfish and single-minded dream is to set up home on the (presumably intentionally) phallic shaped point of land he has marked as his own.

In a story as old as the New South Wales creeks themselves, the oppressed becomes the oppressor, the dominated becomes the dominator, and yet Grenville’s text shies away from confronting these truths head-on (bringing to mind Slavoj Zizek’s notion of the “real” and “virtual” text, the virtual being embedded yet subsumed within the real).

While the plight of the Aboriginal people is handled with some skill and poignancy, the text obfuscates the extent to which this same capitalist domination manifests on the domestic level, as Thornhill’s wife is forced to relinquish her dream of returning to London at her husband’s behest, as he falls in love with his newly attained status.

Grenville is adept at delineating the cruelty and repression which marked the birth of Australia, and the ceaseless inevitabilities of capitalist colonialism. What lets her down, ultimately, is some relatively uninteresting prose and a lack of vibrant characterization.

This Review was first published in Alan's Blog.

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