Australian’s traditional narrative of the colonisation of Australia has been long founded on the European coloniser’s stories alone. Excluding the Aboriginal voice and views of the colonisation of their land. Recent texts such as The Secret River, have been produced to disrupt this traditional ideology and contributed to the undermining of these traditional ideas of colonialism. These texts can be interpreted and read in a number of different ways. The Secret River, a postcolonial novel, by Kate Grenville, has a range of possible readings. One of the reading of Grenville’s novel is that it is a story of two contrasting worldviews that tragically collide, never to be reconciled. Another is a reading that challenges the myth that the colonisers simply “took up” the “uninhabited” land and “dispersed” the “savage” natives in “the usual manner”, when in reality there was a strong guerrilla-type resistance from the
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When confronted with clashing interests, people are forced to make significant, often life-altering decisions. These situations remove people from their comfort zone making the nature of their responses difficult and complex. These choices are often made by the individual’s most basic values and instincts but also influenced by the social groups and the pressure they exert about what is considered wrong and right, and the consequences of not succumbing to these views. This is exemplified in the The Secret River, as Thornhill said “There were no signs that the blacks felt that the place belonged to them. They had no fences that said this is mine. No house that said, this is our home. There were no fields or flocks that said, we have put the labour of our hands into this place.” Conveying that the colonisers world view was that Australia was theirs to take and establish as it was only inhabited by “savages.”
When confronted with clashing interests, people are forced to make significant, often life-altering decisions. These situations remove people from their comfort zone making the nature of their responses difficult and complex. These choices are often made by the individual’s most basic values and instincts but also influenced by the social groups and the pressure they exert about what is considered wrong and right, and the consequences of not succumbing to these views. This is exemplified in the The Secret River, as Thornhill said “There were no signs that the blacks felt that the place belonged to them. They had no fences that said this is mine. No house that said, this is our home. There were no fields or flocks that said, we have put the labour of our hands into this place.” Conveying that the colonisers world view was that Australia was theirs to take and establish as it was only inhabited by “savages.”