The Secret River
by Kate Grenville
A convict settler. Aboriginal land. The choice he makes.
For you if
you want to understand how ordinary people become complicit in atrocity when the system makes it the path of least resistance
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William Thornhill is a Thames waterman transported to New South Wales for theft in 1806. He is given land on the Hawkesbury River — land that belongs to the Darug people, though the colonial legal system pretends otherwise. Grenville traces Thornhill's slow moral deterioration from a man who wants to coexist to a man who participates in a massacre. She wrote this as an attempt to understand her own ancestors' involvement in the dispossession of Aboriginal Australians — a white Australian reckoning with what her family did. The most honest settler colonial dispatch on the Australian shelf.
Where This Book Lives
- Setting
- Australia
- Voice
- Written by a Australia author
Related Viewing
Shares a topic, theme, or setting with this book in the catalog.
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Murder for money, disguised as marriage.
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Why it’s here: Punk in centering Mollie Burkhart's interiority instead of turning her murder into a backdrop for a white antihero's guilt. Pedagogical in showing how legalized guardianship and "headrights" turned bureaucracy itself into a weapon against the Osage.
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Same event, different angle
The same history — told by someone who saw it differently.
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✦ READ – REFLECT → RESIST
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Dark Emu
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The explorers' journals said Aboriginal Australians were farmers. Australia ignored it.
✦ READ – REFLECT → RESIST
The Fatal Shore
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Australia was built by convicts. This is what that actually meant.
✦ READ – REFLECT → RESIST
Same pattern, different era
Different time, different place. The same thing keeps happening.
