Unsettled

Kate Grenville's non-fiction meditation, Unsettled, is one of the best books I've read this year. Grenville is well-known for her novels based on her family's history: The Secret River, Sarah Thornhill, Restless Dolly Maunder. She's also written Searching for the Secret River, which is an account of the research process she went through while writing the first of those novels. Unsettled is a different kind of journey, though she often refers to that research and ancestral history. But this time, she's looking at the bigger picture -- not just the individuals of her family and the choices they made, but how those choices fitted into a broader colonial narrative.

Grenville takes a simple but effective structure, retracing various ancestors' movements, from that first settlement on the Hawkesbury, further and further out from Sydney, finishing with the farm where her own mother was brought up. Along the way, she reflects on the way 'settlement,' or more bluntly, stealing land from First Nations people, must have felt for both the colonists and the dispossessed. She brilliantly examines the way our language serves to obscure the reality of what happened -- how we speak of settlers 'taking up land', when we really mean 'taking land.' Squatters 'got' land, women 'were never left without a gun.' What horrors are those bland words hiding?

There are plenty of challenging ideas here, but Grenville leads us through the landscape and her own thoughts gently but firmly, never allowing us to turn away completely, while acknowledging the strong urge to hide from the truth that has gripped our nation from its beginnings. She ends on a hopeful note, visiting the memorial to the Myall Creek massacre, the only occasion when white men were hanged for the murder of Aboriginal people -- a memorial that was constructed after local inhabitants, Black and white, sat down together to commemorate their shared, painful history.

Unsettled would be a perfect book to give to someone just learning about Australian history, or someone who grew up when we weren't taught the truth. It is confronting, but it's not sanctimonious or preachy, and it's engagingly easy to read; we travel beside Grenville as she works through her own feelings and thoughts. Yes, it's written from a white person's point of view, but as a first hand struggle with accepting and sitting with our shameful past, it's intimate, valuable and powerful.