Andrew’s World Literature Blog

     In Kate Grenville’s The Secret River, Dick Thornhill represents the idea of child innocence, fear of our own ignorance, and nature vs. nurture. As the first section of the novel painstakingly establishes, Thornhill, Sal, and even Willie’s entire world exists in London for most of their life. They are suddenly sent to an unknown world with the context of their occupation being a punishment. This is something even Willie was old enough to understand, so they naturally approached everything in this new world with fear and caution.       Dick on the other hand finds that childlike wonder of exploration that all children have in their environment, the difference being that all he has ever known has been in Sydney. While he still is surrounded by a society that inherently considers the native people to be lesser and to be savages, Dick still manages to treat them as people like anybody else. His perception of the world isn’t as harshly ingrained in soc...

     Part B of Lecture 2 about Grenville’s The Secret River detailed the social context and controversy found in the making of the novel. As is evident in the book, the reader finds little to no introspection or thoughts from the aboriginal population. All of the information gathered about them comes from accounts and interactions of the settlers (mostly Thornhill), which is mostly highly bigoted. I understand that the point is that they don’t speak the same language and therefore can’t communicate with Thornhill, who is the perspective we follow throughout. Even so, this results in the indigenous population not having a voice and their story exclusively being told by the colonizers. I somewhat feel that this can muddle the message of the book and its social purpose considering that it falls into the category of a one-sided story for native populations.       I had not known about the Walk For Recognition across the Sydney Harbor Bridge in 2000, and h...

Do you believe that if you (as you are now) were given a position of power or higher status, you would treat those you knew before as lesser? Does the fact that Thornhill grew up in a harsher environment in which he never felt like he owned anything influence his feeling of superiority, or is it human nature?

       I believe that the biggest influence settler colonialism has on Kate Grenville’s The Secret River isn’t even necessarily the active settler colonialism taking place in New South Wales, but in the way stories are told. Within the most recent lecture, we learned further about how indigenous people are often misrepresented in their history. Not only are they attributed less than American authors writing about them, but the indigenous story seems to be inseparable from colonialism and their colonizers in general. The lecture also notes that even when the colonizing stops, its impact seeps through all of that people’s culture, language, education, etc. The lecture on Tommy Orange’s There There even mentions how historically understood stories are completely skewed or made to look better in favor of colonizers, with stories like Pocahontas and the big one, Christopher Columbus.       Within The Secret River, the language and cultural barrier ...

       The “Strangers” section reinforces the varying themes of separation and alienation throughout the novel’s historical context. There is separation between class, foreign groups, language— even just the workers at Thornhill’s rowing job shows a hierarchy of some sort. Even before meeting the aboriginal Australian man, the despair felt by Thornhill “under these alien stars, his bones rot in this cold earth” (Grenville 4) features a separation between his life where he grew up and this foreign land he is essentially sentenced to die in. When he meets the aboriginal man, the first thing Thornhill takes note of is his dark skin, which “swallowed the light and made him not quite real, something only imagined” (5). Thornhill has never seen anybody like this, and between the spear, mutual confusion, and language barrier, he immediately goes on the defensive and begins deterring the man like he would a dog, or even a monster, as he tells him to “go to the devil!” (5). T...

     One of the most well known ideas about 18th century London is the filth and sickness that ravaged the citizens, especially the poorest areas. Something that I hadn’t really paid much attention to was the weather, and how that contributed to the poor health. Page 26 of Grenville’s The Secret River describes “the hardest freeze of the year, a day in January when the pearly clouds themselves seemed made of ice and the air was painful to breathe.” Not to mention how “the river froze over, stone solid for two weeks” (Grenville 25). When I think about this unbearable cold in an era that had little remedies like we do now (efficient insulation, heaters, better shelters, etc.), it furthers the idea of this large mass of people getting sick, and with less ways to treat it due to less efficient medicine. People also had to work outside doing hard labor, and I’m sure many people died overworking themselves in the cold. There’s also the common theme of youth dying, especially n...