Review of The Secret River by Katie François

In The Secret River the main character, a Thames

boatman called William Thornhill, resorts to crime to

provide for his wife and his son. He is caught, but

spared from hanging by the sentence of lifetime

transport to Australia. He builds a new life with his

family in New South Wales and eventually wins his

freedom. He longs to have a piece of land to call his

own and carves out a plot for himself along the

Hawkesbury River which he calls Thornhill's Point. It

does not occur to him that the land he covets could

already be owned. There are visible signs of other

lives but he lays his mark - a square drawn in the

dirt. Thornhill's attempts to ignore the signs that the

land is already occupied lead to tension and

confrontations between the white settlers and the

aborigines. This escalates into violence and Thornhill

chooses to be a part of a violent punitive expedition

in order to defend his own interests.

The descriptions of the Australian landscape are very

visual and evocative: the bright light, the eucalyptus

trees, the soil, the river... Character portraits are

somewhat lacking or superficial; we know that

William Thornhill is illiterate but not insensitive, his

wife Sal is a rock; other portrayals are flimsy or totally

absent.

Light and dark are recurrent themes; one river is

traded for another when William Thornhill and his

family move from a life beside the dark, squalid and

depressing Thames to the bright, light Hawkesbury

River. The idea of leaving one prison for another also

runs through the book, from the confinement of

Thornhill's prison cell in Newgate which is replaced

by the symbolic square which Thornhill draws in the

dirt in order to make "his mark over the face of the

land". At the very end, we are reminded that there is

a speck of New South Wales "enclosed by William

Thornhill's wall."

The Secret River takes some time getting to its crux of

drama and could easily have been shorter. The mise

en scène in London is good reading but not all

necessary. The London scenes did show his dislike

of the gentry and this could perhaps have been used

again once Thornhill himself had a fine villa [built on

a sacred aborigine site] with stone lions at the gates

and a gaggle of servants.

Neither religion nor politics are really present in the

book; it is more of a historical novel which deals with

the white settlers' perspective in a clash for territorial

possession where the aborigine concept of individual

land-ownership is alien and bewildering. It would

probably make a good film.

The Secret River is a credible account of how a man

of good instincts becomes involved in atrocity.