Based on the recommendation by Un-lic-ed, I suggested to my book club that we read The Secret River when it was my turn to host the discussion in February.
To give my friends a taste of Down Under, I served some Melba toast with cheese and precious imported vegemite, veggie cottage pie, damper, and some mini pavlovas for dessert. The damper was a bit of a disaster (over-salted and under-cooked), and no one else appreciated the vegemite, but the rest of the meal seemed to go down well, especially as it was accompanied by gifts of Australian wines, caramels, chips, and chocolates.
We began the discussion by contrasting the world-view of hunter-gatherers versus agriculturalists. A hunter-gatherer may have time for leisure when the season is right, but in early colonial Australia an agriculturalist must work from dawn to dust. A hunter-gatherer sees themselves and the land as one entity, and does not recognise fences or boundaries – if they were to take ears of corn from a field, they see their task as simply gathering food as they have done for 40 millennia. Of course, the Thornhills felt very differently, and felt it was their right to claim terra nullius (land belonging to no one): “here 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.” (p93). In Australia, the concept of terra nullius was not overturned until the Aboriginal rights case of Mabo in 1992.
This discussion also brought up stories of the Irish Travellers (also known as Minceir or Pavees, or an Lucht Siúil), with some members of the club demonstrating their knowledge and fluency in Irish. Nomaic people such as these often set up halting (caravan) sites on common lands or private plots. How do we reconcile the rights of those of us who believe that we own these particular squares of land with those who have been travelling freely for generations?
We decided that owning land was so important to William because in England, it is this characteristic that distinguishes the gentry from the commoners. He yearns to own land, so vital after is humiliation as a waterman in London. “He let himself imagine it: standing on the crest of that slope, looking down over his own place. Thornhill’s Point. It was a piercing hunger in his guts: to own it. To say mine, in a way he had never been able to say mine of anything at all.” (p 106). For the first time he had status, and “His voice was rich with the pleasure of being able to shout to another person.”
Though in order to bend this “thumb of land” to their will, the Thornhills attempted a very British approach, with British crops and British agricultural practises. This seems laughable to us now, with our easy access to the world’s information at our fingertips, but for those that had spent their whole lives by the Thames, what else did they know? Like most settlers at that time, the Thornhills emigrated to Australia under duress.
The group was divided over whether or not Sal and William were happy with their lot in the end. They had status and a fine house, but at what price?
“The Secret River” is now an assigned text for English courses in many states of Australia, yet our treatment of the indigenous population continues to be dismal. Throughout the 20th century up to the 1970s, children were forcibly removed from their families by the church and the government. In the year 2000, more than 250,000 Australians walked across Sydney Harbour Bridge to say “Sorry”. However, it wasn’t until 2008 that the government formally apologised for these actions.