He’s referring, of course, to the often-brutal relationship between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians in the past.įrom its tumultuous beginnings, The Secret River has enjoyed a long life. The title is a quote from W.H.Stanner’s 1968 Boyer Lecture, where he says: “A secret river of blood runs through Australian history”. How should a nation tell its foundation story, when that story involves the dispossession of other people? Is there a path between the “black armband” and the “white blindfold” versions of a history like ours? The Secret River caused controversy when it first appeared, and become a pawn in the “history wars” that continues to this day. The story of one set of people taking over the territory of others is a universsal one, and it can’t be evaded. But the work of historians makes it clear that there was violence between black and white on the Hawkesbury, even if Solomon Wiseman wasn’t part of it, and that was the story I had to try to tell. The documentary record is completey silent on that matter.
I’ll probably never know how he dealt with the fact that he had taken – stolen – land that belonged to the indigenous people of the area. The land made him rich beyond anything he could have dreamed of in London. Within a few years he was pardoned, and “took up land”, as the euphemism goes, on the banks of the Hawkesbury. Like the character William Thornhill, my great-great-great grandfather Solomon Wiseman was an illiterate Thames bargeman who was transported to Australia in 1806 for stealing a load of timber. Many of its details are based on my own family history.
The Secret River is set in the early nineteenth century, on what was then the frontier between British colonists and Australia’s indigenous people: the Hawkesbury River, fifty miles from Sydney.
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