Representing Australia’s Colonial Past :A Hybrid Interpretation Of Kate Grenville’s Colonial Trilogy

Kate Grenville is one of the most important contemporary Australian writers. She has published nine novels, a collection of short stories, and four books about the writing process, winning numerous national and international prizes. In the twenty first century, she has conceived a series of historical novels set in Australia’s colonial past, namely The Secret River (2005), The Lieutenant (2008), and Sarah Thornhill (2011), which have been highly acclaimed after their publishing. The three novels have been called the colonial trilogy. Through re-presenting fictionalized historical archives, Grenville re-constructs Australia’s colonial past, to voice the silences about the past. But some scholars criticized the trilogy has beautified the real history of colonial invasion and minimized the cruel conflicts between white settlers and Australian Aborigines. The vague boundary line between fiction and history of Kate Grenville’s trilogy is censured by historians.However, the author deems that the fictional construction of colonial history by Grenville reflects today’s growing national sense of Australian’s need to reexamine and rethink the relationship between settlers and Indigenous Australians. Specifically, Grenville narrates the story about Australian Aborigine and three white settlers’generations in the early Australia’s history from a white writer’s viewpoint in her trilogy. The thesis argues that the trilogy clarifies the racial difference between white settlers and Australians Aborigines, but concentrates on the forms of hybridity in such differences rather than only resistances.In light of the post-colonial critic Homi Bhabha’s hybridity theory, the thesis takes the fictionalized colonial history by Grenville into account, to break the binary opposition in colonial world, create the third space in the trilogy, and interpret the subjectivity, culture, and language between white settlers and Australian Aborigines from the perspective of hybridity. The thesis reflects the mutual constructions of subjectivity, culture and language of white settlers and Australian Aborigines in the trilogy, and expresses Kate Grenville, as a contemporary Anglo-Australian, her representation of colonial history. With the hybrid interpretation of the colonial trilogy, the thesis concludes that, with the advent of hybridization, the white settlers will accept the culture of Australian Aborigines, and vice versa. Australian culture will be built by the white and the Aboriginal together and Australia society will enter into the period of the multiculturalism.Instead of conquest and servitude based on the binary opposition in the colonial world, the post-colonial hybrid interpretation of the colonial trilogy presents coexistence of different subjectivities, exchange of different cultures and dialogue between different languages of white settlers’ and Australian Aborigines’. The thesis conforms to the Grenville’s writing expectation of representing colonial past, to reach the goal of reconciliation between white settlers and Indigenous Australians and the implications of this for Australian democracy. In the meanwhile, the hybrid interpretation of the trilogy fits into the times and interest of modern readers, increases the books’ acceptability and carries a foreshadowing of Grenville’s winning international reputation.