Opening Hours
Monday - Thursday: 7.30am - 6.00pm
Friday : 7.30am - 5.00pm
Contact
Phone: 02 9855 7661
Email: library@pymblelc.nsw.edu.au
On the frontier: the intriguing dance of history and fiction
By the late 1990s, frontier conflict had become accepted in Australian historiography and there was a conservative backlash, seeking to discredit a generation of research.
Conservative critics initiated a fight over footnotes and tried to count the precise number of Aboriginal and settler dead on the frontier as if it decided the ethics of the issue.
It was the moral vacuum created by this critique that invited, indeed demanded, works such as Mark McKenna’s Looking for Blackfellas’ Point (2002), Inga Clendinnen’s Dancing with Strangers (2003), and Kate Grenville’s The Secret River (2005), all published in the early 2000s, and all stories that aimed to remind us of the intimacy and familiarity of the frontier, of its visceral, violent reality, and also of its alternative human possibilities.
These three books, two of history, one of fiction, sought to enlarge our capacity for compassion, to win back ground for tolerance and understanding.
Friday Essay: on listening to new national storytellers
I think my partner learnt more about Australia’s colonial history watching the ABC mini-series of Grenville's The Secret River than he had ever read in the pages of a history book. Judging by the sales of the book and the reception of its serialisation, I’m sure he’s not alone.
The question is how? How to extend Australian historiography into the fields of public memory and popular histories alongside academic and official public narratives? How to include sites of silence and absence with the historical record? How to recognise the impact of local and family narratives on the national narrative?
The Secret River: have we really moved on?
The Secret River is a two-part ABC television drama that tackles the chilling fundamentals of Australian white settlement: Europeans invaded, slaughtered the first peoples and stole their land.
It is excellent. It is important. It is courageous, confronting television.
But it comes two centuries after the events it depicts: settlement by British convicts and others along the Hawkesbury river in New South Wales and the inevitable, violent confrontations with the Dharug who had inhabited this idyllic place for thousands of years.
Bush Ballad: A Review of The Secret River, by Kate Grenville
This is a narrative whose outlines we know already: convicts transported to Sydney, eventually pardoned, encouraged to settle what seemed to be an empty continent. They didn't understand, and wouldn't have cared, that the land they were occupying was sacred to the mysterious, dark-skinned people who appeared and disappeared from the forests and seemed to them no more than naked savages.
The Secret River, silences and our nation's history
Neil Armfield’s new stage adaptation of Kate Grenville’s 2005 novel The Secret River invites us to think about the complex relationships between personal and national histories, and the past and the present.
Grenville’s novel sparked controversy when it was published. The play reopens these contentious questions about who can tell the story of our shared history. Should it be historians or novelists, Indigenous or non-Indigenous storytellers?
Grenville’s book began as research into her family history. She wanted to fill in the blanks of inherited stories about her ancestor, a pardoned convict who may have killed Aboriginal people during Australia’s settlement. But The Secret River always gestured to a wider story. It asks provocative questions about the silences in one family, but also in our nation’s history.
The Secret River by 
