A Study Of Kate Grenville’s "Colonial Trilogy"

As one of the most prestigious women writers in Australia, Kate Grenville’s thirty-year writing career demonstrates her development as a writer. Since the year 2000, she has extended her theme from feminist focus to Australia’s colonial history. The Secret River(2005), The Lieutenant(2008) and Sarah Thornhill(2011) are generally regarded as her “Colonial Trilogy”. The Secret River won many literary awards and was short-listed for the Man Booker Prize. In an interview, Grenville talks about her intention of writing about the dark side of the history and declares that she wants to say sorry to the Aboriginal people on behalf of her white ancestors. What she said has raised very heated discussions and debates about the objectivity of Grenville’s representation of colonial history. Comparatively speaking, researches on the latter two novels are still very limited, especially on this trilogy as a whole.This thesis tries to explore the trilogy from the perspective of settler post-colonialism. It examines whether Grenville expresses her apology in the trilogy from three aspects: women’s intermediary role, the relation between colonizers and massacre, and representation of the Aboriginal people. It argues that, as a settler writer, Grenville’s complicit characteristics decline in the trilogy and her oppositional features increase. This thesis is divided into five chapters. The first chapter is a brief introduction to Kate Grenville, her “Colonial Trilogy” and related researches on it, as well as the theoretical framework of the thesis. The following three chapters are the body part of the thesis. Each of them discusses one novel of the trilogy according to the sequence of the publication date. Chapter Two examines The Secret River. In that novel, Grenville doesn’t fully achieve her goal of apologizing to the Aboriginal people due to her complicit identity of being an heir to the imperial culture. Chapter Three analyzes The Lieutenant and suggests that the novel makes a bit of progress than the previous one in representing the Aboriginal people and offers some reconciliation possibilities. Chapter Four digs into Sarah Thornhill and argues that it reflects Grenville’s oppositional opinions on colonialism and conveys Grenville’s intention of saying sorry through the protagonist?s symbolic apology to the Aboriginal people. Chapter Five summarizes the previous analysis and concludes that Grenville makes a gradual and spiral path of change if the trilogy is taken as a whole. She doesn’t meet her goal of saying sorry in The Secret River, but makes a flawed apology in The Lieutenant and finally, in Sarah Thornhill her intention is fulfilled. The Conclusion part reiterates the contradictions in settler ideology and the representation in the “Colonial Trilogy”. It also puts the trilogy in the context of Australian history and emphasizes its positive effects for the whites’ reconciliation with the Indigenous people.