The tradition of historical fiction in Australian literature runs along three main lines: convict fiction, contact-history fiction, and pioneer sagas. Grenville is writing with a strong awareness of all these strands, but also within a strong tradition of Australian women writers. Two of the book’s most obvious predecessors are Thea Astley’s A Kindness Cup (1974) and Jessica Anderson’s The Commandant (1975). Astley’s novel is about a massacre of Aboriginal people in the late nineteenth century, Anderson’s about the convict settlement at Moreton Bay around 1830. Grenville, however, takes on both topics at once, and shows how inextricable the one is from the other in the history of the region where most of her book is set. Quite as much as anything else, this novel is also the story of a marriage.

The ‘secret river’ of the title is the Hawkesbury, whose hidden mouth lies thirty miles or so up the coast from the settlement at Sydney Cove. But the book begins on a different river on the other side of the world, where William Thornhill, waterman, has learned every current and landing on the Thames after an impoverished waterside childhood followed by a seven-year apprenticeship ferrying the gentry back and forth across the river. Will thrives as a waterman until a hard London January freezes the river. Caught stealing timber in a desperate effort to shelter and feed his family, he is initially sentenced to death; the sentence is reduced to transportation for life, and he is allowed to take his pregnant wife, Sal, and their baby son with him to Australia.

On their arrival in Sydney, he is assigned to his own wife as her convict servant, and from that point they are on their own in the wattle-and­daub hut on the edge of the ‘sad, scrabbling place’ that was Sydney in 1806. Will soon discovers the River Hawkesbury, used by watermen as a route for transporting inland cargo to Sydney, and then finds out, to his astonishment, that tracts of the beautiful country along the river can be had for the asking. ‘He came out into a clearing where trees held an open space in a play of shifting light and shade: a room made of leaves and air.’

Once the growing Thornhill family is established in their new home along the river, it is Sal who makes the first and most successful contact with the local Aborigines, joking with the women and exchanging bonnets for wooden bowls. The female exchanges in this cultural no man’s land are peaceful and, mostly, benign. But it is also Sal who eventually gives in to the growing fear, among white settlers, of the Aboriginal people whose lives they have invaded and who have begun to fight back. Eventually, while Sal threatens to leave and take the children back to Sydney, the settlers plan a raid – ‘Sterminate them, Smasher said. No one going to come out and say it but ain’t it the only way?’ – and Will, a clear-sighted and honourable character as far as he goes, is forced to make a choice between joining the raid and losing his wife.

Readers who know Joan Makes History (1988), Grenville’s parodic, alternative account of Australian history through women’s eyes, will be aware that she has already given Australian history and historiography a great deal of attention. She knows all the technical problems of writing historical fiction, and in her new novel solves one of them – style – at a stroke, by making her main character an uneducated but highly intelligent man and matching her style to his thought: simple, pared-down language, with the occasional sharp insight. ‘A man’s heart was a deep pocket he might tum out and be amazed at what he found there.’ It is a clear, simple style that, without actually being a first­person narrative – with all of the restrictions that would entail – reflects not merely Will’s narrative point of view but also his way of speaking and seeing the world.

Moreover, the problem of representing Aboriginal characters and culture is solved partly by the use of this point of view: what’s seen and said about them is refracted through the limited and compromised awareness of a simple character with complex motives. Writing this story from Will’s point of view complicates its race politics in a way that lifts the novel high above the level of propaganda. And there is one astonishing scene in which Will, exploring ‘his’ land, comes across some rock carvings: first, a fifteen-foot fish carved an inch deep into solid rock, and, overlapping it, another rock drawing he recognises with shock as a picture of his own boat, the Hope – with no one at the helm.

This is the affirmation of an Aboriginal culture that not only exists as a living force in the present but that incorporates new experiences and images into the land itself. There is something extraordinarily shocking and moving about this moment, which in some ways is the turning point of the book. The image is reminiscent of a painting called Creation 2003, by Sandra Saunders, one of the ‘proponent women’ in the Hindmarsh Island Bridge affair of the mid-l990s in South Australia; this extraordinarily beautiful picture, done in dense jewel colours, is an oblique aerial view of the Murray Mouth mainland, Hindmarsh Island, and the bitterly resisted bridge between. In what appears to be a stunningly generous act of reconciliation, Saunders has taken the bridge and effortlessly incorporated it into her vision of the landscape, turning it into a thing of beauty whose curves fit and echo the shape of the clouds and the roads, the hills, the shore, and the river.

In the end, the Thornhill family prospers, between brief whispers of unease. The cultural and allegorical richness of the name ‘Will Thornhill’ floats in the novel’s air like the scent of eucalyptus, to be taken or left; only lovers of Jane Eyre, for example, might remember the name of the mansion with the terrible secret in the attic, the house that eventually bums to the ground and leaves only ashes behind. In his substantial middle age –relaxed and comfortable, you could say – William Thornhill becomes an allegorical figure of white Australia, two centuries on; his prosperity is founded on a murderous episode he refuses to contemplate or even to remember, like a mansion built on sand.