The Secret River: Reviews & Interviews

"The prominence of the Aussie Battler in the national story has kept Indigenous Australia in the shade. ‘The native tragedy does not yet serve as the motif of dramatic, literary or artistic work of any consequence,’ Bill Stanner remarked back in 1939. ‘There are no epics on the last of the tribes. There are no national monuments to a vanishing people.’ Recent Australian literature has tried to fill this gap in the nation’s monuments ... "

"Kate Grenville draws on Australia's brutal history to provide an intriguing background for The Secret River, says Jem Poster ...

"We asked you for your favourite book of 2006 and promised to feature the most popular choice on the show. The winner is Kate Grenville's The Secret River, which is inspired by research into Grenville’s own family history. It chronicles the life of convict William Thornhill ... "

"Kate Grenville talks to Ramona Koval about her latest, and much anticipated, new novel The Secret River. This is a tale that seeks to gain a new vantage point from which to view Australia's European settlement. It's a story of ordinary people, inter-cultural incoherence and dreadful inevitabilities."

"In the 1950s and 60s the anthropologist WEH Stanner changed the way Australians thought about ourselves and our country. His essays and lectures, notably his 1968 Boyer Lectures, revealed the richness of Aboriginal culture and what he called the 'cult of forgetfulness' practised by white Australians about the fate of this unique culture following European settlement."

"Orange Prize-winner Kate Grenville presents a powerful portrait of the conflict between convicts and Aborigines in The Se"cret River, says Geraldine Bedell ...

‘One of the most entertaining, accomplished, engaging novels written in this country…We always knew Grenville was good, but this one is brilliant…it will live on as a classic.’ Courier Mail
This document will supply you with a good introduction to the novel.