Telling Stories of Colonial Encounters: Kate Grenville’s The Secret River, The Lieutenant and Sarah Thornhill

Abstract

The essay examines the fundamental role of storytelling in the different colonial encounters portrayed by Kate Grenville in her historical-based trilogy: The Secret River (2005), The Lieutenant (2008) and Sarah Thornhill (2011). Starting from Grenville’s assertion that the clash between settlers and Aborigines originated mainly from the “tragic inability to communicate across a gulf of culture,” the essay observes how in the three novels communication and, conversely, incommunicability and miscommunication, both between Europeans (or, later, white Australians) and Indigenous Australians and among Europeans themselves, play a fundamental role in establishing, or failing to establish, relationships and in creating, or in trying to solve, conflicts. The importance of storytelling is investigated in its function of (re)definition of identity and as a necessary step in the process of reconciliation.