Reviewed by Patricia Simms-Reeve
The title, Unsettled, poses questions that Kate Granville’s personal history of the last 200 years seeks to offer with powerful insights into our own relationship with the land which was ‘settled’ by the English in 1788.
The crushing defeat of the referendum in 2023 compels those who were disappointed and deeply saddened by the result to look for alternative pathways to recognition; and accepting that the Continent was not in fact ‘terra nullius’ and truth telling is a step towards addressing the challenge.
In her book, Kate Grenville casts her historically trained eye on her own family and, in doing so, has presented us with an unflinching account of how they lived their lives.
They lived on stolen land, for Australia’s records show that it is the only colonial country that did not initially establish a form of treaty or agreement with the original inhabitants.
She becomes aware that, with knowledge of the past, her own history alters. Once touted settlers who carved a living from a forbidding land are the focus. As she delves into the facts that surface, her imagination convincingly furnishes the rest. Those earlier generations regarded England as ‘home’ but she does not. She is at the point where she is trying to discover how to be Australian. ‘That meant working out what it meant to be ‘descended from the people who’d taken it……from the people whose place it was.’
When she remembers childhood games like Cowboys and Indians, it is mentioned that we never played Settlers and Aborigines. No mention of the First Nations was made, or if so, in schools, only briefly.
Recent dialogue between historians have decried the Black armband of History attitude but more often now, acknowledge such horrors as the Myall Creek massacre. Until then, the ‘settling’ and ‘squatting’ that took place was celebrated and the reality of terms such as squattocracy denoted a higher social class that had immense political power.
One imagines that the indigenous people must feel enormously unsettled with the changes that have happened since colonisation. The environment suffered irreparable damage. Clearances, fencing, the introduction of domestic animals, the destruction of food sources, and desecration of sacred sites.
Kate Grenville cannot ignore her disquiet as she travels from where her family first lived at Wiseman’s Bay up to New England, where they acquired land and where her mother spent her childhood. Her feelings are mixed but are dominated by a sense of trespass, despite her family having been in this country for over five generations. Few traces remain of their occupation today – thought provoking in a landscape little changed over millennia.
Considering the dark history since 1776, it would be easy to raise an outcry against the crimes committed in ‘settling’ here, but the author avoids this. Her concentration on her family is a subtle reference to the idea that guilt does not rest with us, although we introduced a life alien to the First Nations people whose existence was integral to their surroundings.
Throughout the book she stresses the essential requisite that we become aware of the facts. Is the legacy of this being that we must all become ‘unsettled’?
In this case, this book is a brilliant accomplishment, particularly because Grenville writes with her characteristic calm intensity enhanced by intelligent conclusions. Her journey through the northwest of NSW reads as a thrilling account of a family history which, one surmises, many would find is an echo of their own.
Unsettled
[2025]
by Kate Grenville
Black Inc
ISBN: 978 176064 564 9
$36.99; 250pp