The Secret River

William Thornhill is a Thames waterman transported to New South Wales for theft in 1806. He is given land on the Hawkesbury River — land that belongs to the Darug people, though the colonial legal system pretends otherwise. Grenville traces Thornhill's slow moral deterioration from a man who wants to coexist to a man who participates in a massacre. She wrote this as an attempt to understand her own ancestors' involvement in the dispossession of Aboriginal Australians — a white Australian reckoning with what her family did. The most honest settler colonial dispatch on the Australian shelf.