A conversation with novelist Kate Grenville is something akin to being gently reminded of the importance of paying curious attention to everything around us.
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Her thoughts range readily over the variances of history, the difficulties of writing, the persistent presence of synthetic smells and the perils of assuming indigenous experience into one’s creativity.
Kate Grenville has written eight novels and many other works of non-fiction, including her latest book The Case Against Fragrance, a detailed examination and exploration of how manufactured scents and perfumes can have a deleterious effect on our health.
She will be appearing at this year’s Clunes Booktown Festival on May 6 and 7 to discuss her work and her interests.
Kate Grenville spoke to The Courier’s Caleb Cluff about her recent books and her experience of writing.
The first of your books I read was given to me as course study while I was at Sydney University in 1984. It was Lillian’s Story. Certainly it was the most memorable book on that course. In fact I still have my university copy.
Oh that’s lovely, that's a most extraordinary fact. I had no idea about that. In 1984 it had only just been published. That really is amazing.
Let’s start with what you're doing at Clunes. You’ve been here before.
I was there maybe three or four years ago. I had a wonderful day. I’m on two panels this time. The first one is in the In Conversation with Dr Tess Brady that will be about the most recent book The Case Against Fragrance.
The second one is a panel and it's about writing indigenous-white relations.
What do you expect to speak about in those forums? Starting with Dr Tess Brady.
We'll talk about The Secret River and we'll probably also talk about The Lieutenant because it's on a school reading list of some kind. I imagine we will touch on both of those. And I'm hoping we might also mention the book – not the last one but the one just before, the book about my mother, One Life. Which is a book I loved writing and love talking about. Then I imagine we will talk about the most recent one, The Case Against Fragrance.
(On the second forum) I think that at least one of the other writers is indigenous; possibly both of the others. It's a panel discussion so imagine I will kind of take my cue from what the others are saying. It's a very interesting area for a writer to talk about indigenous-white relations.
Some of your more recent work, I mean The Lieutenant in 2008 and The Secret River in 2005, those works deal very much with the nature of relations between the colonial settlers and indigenous people.
And Sarah Thornhill.
As a white writer, my books don't actually talk about indigenous-white relations, in the sense that I have always made it a sort of policy not to try to tell any version of the indigenous viewpoint, because I don't think it's my place. Indigenous writers are doing that, and excellently.
So it seemed to me when I was writing the trilogy that my place was to tell a story that hadn't been told in detail, or in fictional detail, which was what it was like to be one of those a white settlers – many of whom were engaged in violence.
Beyond the cliff an enormous body of quiet water curved away to the west. Sirius glided past bays lined with crescents of yellow sand and headlands of dense forest. There was something about this vast hidden harbour - bay after perfect bay, headland after shapely headland - that put Rooke in a trance. He felt he could have travelled along it forever into the heart of this unknown land. It was the going forward that was the point, not the arriving, the water creaming away under the bow, drawn so deeply along this crack in the continent that there might never be any need to stop.
- Kate Grenville, The Secret River
I found that incredibly confronting. As the descendant of one of those, I found it confronting.
I have no idea what my forebears did. There's no record of what they did in relation to the Aboriginal people but even if they, as individuals, were very honorable, the fact is that I’m part of the group that has dispossessed the Aboriginal people.
It's very hard to imagine how vast this country must've seemed to people then. Terrifying. We have this sort of small idea of exactly what went on, how little of it can ever be recorded or reported.
It’s just the tip of the iceberg I think. When you read Henry Reynolds’ books about that, and he's the man who – I mean many other historians have too – but he has dug into the archives and come up with those little shreds of sometimes disguised or coded information, like the use of the word disperse. Which was a euphemism for shoot. So I think you're right; it was very, very widespread.
There were certainly exceptions. White settlers were incredibly varied in their response, as in fact Aboriginal people were too. Indigenous people had many different kinds of responses to what was happening.
So it wasn't as if it was a kind of monolith, which is why in The Secret River I tried to show some of the range of settler feelings: from the absolutely vile violence of Smasher Sullivan to the relatively honorable behavior of Blackwood; and Thornhill of course is somewhere in the middle.
Did you go up to Wisemans Ferry (setting of The Secret River) very much?
Yes I went to Wisemans Ferry a great deal. I found it really helpful, in fact essential, to spend a lot of time on the actual place where the events happened. So I spent a lot of time in the bush, and it happens that across the river from the Wisemans Ferry village is Dharug National Park. You can go there – I mean it was probably firestick farmed by the indigenous people to some extent – but you can go there and feel that you have some connection with what it might have been like in the early Nineteenth Century.
So every time I ran out of steam a bit, my inspiration was to go back and have another walk in that bush.
Almost – even in the 1970s – it was as though Wiseman’s Ferry hadn't really moved on from that colonial time, as though it had been cut off.
Even though it has changed to some extent, the land is still there. If you know where to look there are signs of Aboriginal habitation everywhere. I was very lucky. I met a man who showed me the thousands – I mean he didn't show me thousands – but it's clear there are thousands of rock engravings.
There are caves with paintings and stencils. There are trees that have been marked where they have levered out a canoe or a coolamon. In the little creeks you can find the places where they sharpened the stone axes.
So once your eyes have been opened to that – and they do have to be opened, you have to be taught what to look for – you realise that this was like a city. It was intensively lived in and used.
You’re well known for doing extensive amounts of research to background and to prepare your writing. Obviously that's something that you enjoy?
I love it.
Do you find yourself longing to go into the Mitchell Library?
It's interesting: I would be in the Mitchell Library this very day researching my next book except for your phone call. I'm itching to get in there, to some boxes of stuff that I have my eye on.
Are there undiscovered tranches of wonderfulness within the Mitchell still, do you think?
I’m sure there are. I’m probably not going to find them because I'm not much of a researcher. Someone like Henry Reynolds can unearth them and know what they mean.
When I was writing The Secret River I did find some things which were amazing.
I mean I've told the story in the book about writing The Secret River of finding my ancestor’s promissory note for £150 or something, a huge sum. It's a little crummy bit of paper. It's amazing that nobody threw it out in the intervening 150 years.
His signature – he was actually illiterate but he'd learned how to write his name – you can see how the pen was trembling in his hand because he was so frightened of borrowing a vast amount of money for someone in his position.
And that was one of those little energy points when I was researching and I thought, ‘well this means nothing to anybody else, thank goodness somebody kept it all these years,’ but, for me, it tells me something about that man.
They are very hard questions to ask yourself because it's very easy to assume with the benefit of hindsight that we would have behaved honorably. But we can't be sure. I think you have to accept the fact that there is a very painful thing that has to be looked at there.
- Kate Grenville
Not just what he did, but who he was seeing, the trembling nature of his signature. It was the kind of treasure that you hope for, but you can't actually go looking for it. You don't know what you're looking for until you’ve found it.
What is the point of inspiration; when suddenly something comes and you think, 'ah this would make a good subject, a good story, a good novel!'
For me it's always something I don't understand. It's a question. Because to write a novel takes a couple of years, and you do have to have a very strong reason for writing a novel, other than just writing a bit of entertainment, which I'm not that interested in.
So for me: it's a question you don't understand.
What I didn't understand was... I knew that my ancestor had had gone up the Hawkesbury River because my mother told me the stories and the way she described it was, “he took up land”.
She used that phrase, “took up land”; but when I was walking across the Sydney Harbour Bridge on the day of the Walk for Reconciliation, which would have been 2000, I caught the eye of an Aboriginal woman who was watching us and we exchanged a nice little friendly feeling, exchanged a smile and a wave; but at that very moment I suddenly thought, ‘this wasn't “take up land” it was taken land’.
We took the land from the people who owned it, and I suddenly realised that I needed to understand how that happened. I knew why it happened, but what was it actually like?
How did it play out from moment-to-moment? What was he thinking? I wasn't going to get into the heads of the indigenous people, but I wanted to know what the white people thought they were doing.
So that was the question. That was the engine for that book. I genuinely didn't know. I had to try and enter imaginatively what story they were telling themselves that made it alright to walk in and take an entire continent.
It's a difficult question isn't it? Because we, with the benefit in a strange way of history behind us, we can say ‘well they may or may not have had the same regard as we do for the people whose land they were taking; they may not have had that intellectual sophistication and luxury’.
Many people, perhaps being dispossessed themselves because some, many, most were Irish: they might not have had the sophistication to realise that what they were doing, it had been done to them. On the other hand, maybe the fact that it had been done to them, they understood it all too well.
Exactly. Look, I think people then, as people now, make different decisions. The same history sends people in different directions. There's good evidence, thanks to Henry Reynolds again, we know there's good evidence.
There was a man in South Australia, for example, who used to send money to the British government every year saying, “I know that I'm on Aboriginal land and this is the rent that I would like you to take, to somehow convey this rent, this money to the Aboriginal people whose land I'm farming.”
So they were there were many, many stories of honourable settlers.
Unfortunately I have a feeling they might be outnumbered by the others whose self-interest obviously encouraged them to tell all sorts of rationalisations to themselves.
They said, “well the Aboriginal people: they're not digging, they're not using the land”, that was a favorite excuse, “so therefore we can; we have the right.”
Some of them simply said they were savages.
But I think the response ran the whole gamut and that was what I discovered in the course of my research, and of course that makes the story not only more interesting but more truthful than any kind of “black and white”, so to speak, simplistic thing.
It was very complicated and all the way through I was thinking to myself, ‘well if I had been in my ancestor's shoes, an illiterate poor convict with absolutely no future, suddenly dumped in this place, and realising that it could be the opportunity of a lifetime, what would I have done?’
They are very hard questions to ask yourself because it's very easy to assume with the benefit of hindsight that we would have behaved honorably. But we can't be sure. I think you have to accept the fact that there is a very painful thing that has to be looked at there.
I want to ask you about The Case Against Fragrance. When you are in Melbourne and you go into Myer or David Jones and you go in on the ground floor level, it's overwhelming. This amalgam of sickly sweet, cloying, grabbing fragrances that seem to sweep across you. What was the catalyst for The Case Against Fragrance?
When I was doing the promotional tour for my last book One Life: My Mother's Story, I realised that being out in the world almost always meant that I had a headache.
Because I'm a writer I spend an awful lot of time at home and I see friends and they are used to me not wanting to be around fragrance; that basically fragrance gives me a headache is the thing.
When I was promoting the book it became so bad that I'd been doing crazy things, like sticky-taping the door of the hotel room so the fragrance outside wouldn't come in. And I thought ‘I suppose I’m the only person in the world with this problem, because I've never heard anybody else talk about it; but let's just Google it and see if there are any other humans with this problem,’ and of course as soon as you start researching you realise that one person in three gets either a headache, asthma or nausea or some other bad symptom from fragrance.
I suddenly thought, ‘wait a minute - this is a very common. I'm not a weird one-off; a third of the population is suffering this and yet nobody is talking about it.’
‘So if I did some research, some proper gold-standard science, and looked at the proper rigorous science – not the sort of nonsense you get in forums – and just gather the information and present it in a readable way so that people can make up their own minds about whether they want to go on using this using this stuff, which is not only making other people sick, but some of the chemicals are actually carcinogens and hormone disruptors, so you may be doing yourself harm as well.’
Of course the ethics of where these different fragrances come from in the first place, the different ways they're manufactured and what's used in them, is news. It's the same as mobile phones. There's a whole political and economic discussion that can be had about what exactly is going on there.
There's a lot of mystique about perfumes, but they are all now made of synthetics, because synthetics are thousands of times cheaper than flowers, which is what fragrance used to be made of. No matter how expensive the perfume is, how fancy the bottle is, if it has the word ‘fragrance’ in its ingredients, that one word, by law, is allowed to cover any cocktail of any chemicals. It's a trade secret.
Just finally, I hoped to ask you a little about the process of writing. The hard work.
I have a way of writing that is exploratory. In other words, I disobey that rule that says “Know what you want to write about before you start.”
I don't have plans. I don't write the biographies of the characters and so on before I start writing. It's an exploratory process of rushing into the unknown, rather than the known. To my amazement I’ve found that even people who write very heavily plotted books, very beautifully plotted books, actually start off the same.
Tom Keneally would be a case in point. His books have fabulous, beautifully constructed plots, but they don't necessarily start that way. He describes the pressure of writing as flinging yourself into a whirlpool and trying to swim in the first draft.
That was the same to me. I think an important case to make is to say that creativity is often quite inefficient and you have to just trust the process.
Kate Grenville will be speaking at the Clunes Booktown Festival, May 6 and 7, 2017.