infinite secrets of the river

infinite secrets of the river

Last week, mostly to somehow productively distract myself from the pain unleashed within my circle of Jewish friends and Lebanese friends by the terrorist attack in Bondi, I read Kate Grenville’s Unsettled: A Journey Through Time and Place (2025).

In many ways, Grenville’s reflections in this memoir are essential to the national and moral conversation about colonisation in Australia and its continuing legacies. It is a self-reflexive, self-critical journey through the landscapes of her family history as it happened on Aboriginal land – and as readers of her fiction will recognise from her novels, particularly The Secret River (2005) and Restless Dolly Maunder (2023).

There can never be too many books that shake up the easy presumptions and numbness to the experiences of the Other that comfortable, unconscious whiteness can engender. But, for me, there’s been a nagging discomfort in the way Grenville casts downward glances upon those perceived as lower class – be they the twenty-first century people of London’s East End depicted in her first memoir, Searching for the Secret River (2008),or some of the country folk that people Unsettled. Generalisation is the enemy of truth, I reckon, whenever we’re discussing those whose life experiences are different from our own, and Grenville’s sweeping certitude when it comes to white experience has a habit of making my Irish working-class roots scream, ‘Speak for yourself, lady!’ Never mind the German and Jewish ghosts in there jostling to be seen as well.      

This time, however – or, more specifically yesterday afternoon, as I tried to avoid thinking about the local community vigil for the victims of the Bondi terror attack I’d be attending in a few hours’ time – Unsettled sent me back to the National Library’s Trove to search again online for my own early colonial settlers. I’ve known there was at least one convict the family – only discovered by accident several years ago – but my various attempts to find out details about them led nowhere. Unlike Grenville, none of my family stories have told me anything about this aspect of my history. Until the second half of the twentieth century, there was, of course, a great deal of shame involved in having the convict ‘taint’, as Grenville terms it, so who can blame Nanna for keeping stumm?

The thing is, though, Nanna’s ‘people’ were actually from the Hawkesbury – the main site of colonial endeavour and conflict in The Secret River. I have imagined these ancestors of mine as extras in the farming and frontier violence scenes of the novelbut haven’t been able to assemble anything more substantial than that. It’s not been of urgent importance. Having grown up at La Perouse, Bidjigal Country, amid a strong and diverse Aboriginal community, I’ve had my whiteness shown to me since childhood – and my friends from Lapa continue to keep my snow globe appropriately shaken. In this sense I’m probably more accustomed to questions of unbelonging than Grenville: that I’m not exactly meant to be here doesn’t quite have the same revelatory power, because it’s more a statement of the obvious.

But curiosity always makes fun of a spare moment or a need to keep grief in check, and as the clock ticked towards the need to get myself dressed for the vigil, I started trawling for information about those Hawkesbury forebears of mine again. And the internet, being the ever-expanding resource of historical trivia that it is, delivered something extraordinary.

A family tree on one of the freely accessible genealogy sites showed that both Nanna’s maternal and paternal forebears were pretty much all convicts. My first reaction was a small gut-punch at what a burden it must have been for her to keep that secret her whole life, never sharing one whisper of it with me, her always history-mad granddaughter – that is, if the secret was ever handed down to her. My second reaction was an immediate need to know the crimes of my convicts. Since my scrabbling Irish and Jewish ancestors were not shy of breaking the law in terms of illegal betting and tobacco falling off the back of a truck, my ‘taint’ is not so much a matter of discovery as identity.

Within minutes, I discovered that one of Nanna’s great grandmothers was a proper crim. She’d been transported to Australia in 1791 for stealing 14 yards of lace, 18 yards of lace edging, 3½ yards of muslin, 4 pairs stockings, 4 linen handkerchiefs, 1 printed shawl, 9 yards Irish linen cloth, and 1 muslin apron. Industrious. She only avoided hanging because the colony needed some female stock for the purposes of breeding. Her first husband was something of a proper crim too, having stolen a silver watch and cash. Convict taint gold. And all of this happened a solid 15 years before Grenville’s forebears Solomon Wiseman and her fictional William Thornhill and his wife stepped out of the slums of London and into the Australian frame.

By 1799, my convict pair were farming at Green Hills, or present-day Windsor, on the Hawkesbury – that’s 10 years before Grenville’s Thornhill. That this makes me a descendant of so-called ‘pioneers’ was a shock, but there was one more unexpected revelation yet to come. That year, 1799, the husband, when he was out hunting kangaroo on the slopes of the lower Blue Mountains above the river, was killed by Darug warriors. There are a couple of small but reasonably detailed gazetted accounts of his ‘murder’. It’s also mentioned in Grace Karskens’ epic history of the Hawkesbury-Nepean, People of the River (2020). The murdered settler is described as being one of those who’d built a reputation for ‘friendliness, generosity and fairness’ with the Darug people (p.139). No doubt his killing was fair enough from the Darug perspective – Karskens takes a guess, but who knows how he might have transgressed their laws? Whatever the case, his death led to reprisals against Darug people – the very kind of disproportionate violence that would become typical of the frontier wars.

My very own ‘secret river’, then. And, after the initial surprise, not all that surprising, really. Also unsurprisingly, the stories of my convicts have disappeared from the river. Unlike Solomon Wiseman, they don’t have a place named after them. The hardship my ancestral grandmother must have faced after her husband’s death, a woman alone in the bush with a couple of little kids, has likewise disappeared. She must have wished she’d stayed in the stink of London thieving lace.But as I got up to get ready for the vigil honouring Bondi’s dead and wounded, I realised, if it hadn’t been for those Darug warriors killing her first husband, I wouldn’t have been born.

This is the thought that carried me to the vigil. And as I held my plastic candle there, praying godlessly for peace, I felt the inextricable connectedness of humanity across this continent and across the world. I felt our togetherness in my bones.       

Pic: ‘Hawkesbury River’, Wikicommons, edited