'Winner of the Commonwealth Writers Prize and Australian Book Industry Awards, Book of the Year. After a childhood of poverty and petty crime in the slums of London, William Thornhill is transported to New South Wales for the term of his natural life. With his wife Sal and children in tow, he arrives in a harsh land that feels at first like a de...

Set during the Great Depression, a story about the difference between want and greed written by the author of The Yearling is newly imagined by the Caldecott-winning duo of Why Mosquitos Buzz in People's Ears.

Study guide on this book, written for senior secondary English students and VCE English students.

'Searching for the Secret River is the extraordinary story of how Kate Grenville came to write her award-winning novel, The Secret River. It all began with her ancestor Solomon Wiseman transported to New South Wales for the term of his natural life who later became a wealthy man and built his colonial mansion on the Hawkesbury. Increasingly obse...

Kate Grenville's The Secret River was one of the most loved novels of 2006. Shortlisted for the Booker Prize and awarded the Commonwealth Writer's Prize, the story of William Thornhill and his journey from London to the other side of the world has moved and exhilarated hundreds of thousands of readers. Searching for the Secret River tells the story of how Grenville came to write this wonderful book. It is in itself an amazing story, beginning with Grenville's great-great-great grandfather. Grenville starts to investigate her ancestor, hoping to understand his life. She pursues him from Sydney to London and back, and slowly she begins to realise she must write about him. Searching for the Secret River maps this creative journey into fiction, and illuminates the importance of family in all our lives

The Secret River is a miniseries based on Kate Grenville’s meticulously researched,Booker-nominated bestselling novel of the same title. The Secret River tells the deeply personal story of William and Sal Thornhill,early convict colonists in New South Wales. The Secret River dramatises the British colonisation of Australia in microcosm,with the dispossession of Indigenous Australians made comprehensible and ultimately heart-breaking as William Thornhill’s claim over a piece of land he titles‘Thornhill’s Point’ on the beautiful and remote Hawkesbury River brings his family and neighbours into a fight for survival with the traditional custodians of the land they have settled on.

This is the first published collection of critical essays on the work of Kate Grenville, one of AustraliaOCOs most important contemporary writers. Grenville has been acclaimed for her novels, winning numerous national and international prizes including the Orange Prize for Fiction and the Commonwealth WritersOCO Prize. Her novels are marked by sharp observations of outsider figures who are often under pressure to conform to societyOCOs norms. More recently, she has written novels set in AustraliaOCOs past, revisiting and re-imagining colonial encounters between settlers and Indigenous Australians.This collection of essays includes a scholarly introduction and three new essays that reflect on GrenvilleOCOs work in relation to her approach to feminism, her role as public intellectual and her books on writing. The other nine essays provide analyses of each of her novels published to date, from the early success of LilianOCOs Story and Dreamhouse to the most recently published novel, The Lieutenant . Her work has been the subject of some debate and this is reflected in a number of the essays published here, most particularly with regard to her most successful novel to date, The Secret River . This intellectual engagement with important contemporary issues is a mark of GrenvilleOCOs fiction, testament to her own analysis of the vital role of writers in uncertain times. She has suggested that OC writers have ways of going into the darkest places, taking readers with them and coming out safely.OCO This volume attests to GrenvilleOCOs own significance as a writer in a time of change and to the value of her novels as indices of that change and in OC lighting dark places.OCO"

Apocryphal and Literary Influences on Galway Diasporic History establishes that apocryphal stories, in all their transformations, contribute to collective memory. Common characteristics frame their analysis: irreducible and enduring elements, often embedded in archetypal drama; lack of historical verification; establishment in collective memory; revivals after periods of dormancy; subjection to political and economic manipulation; implicit speculation; and literary transformations. This book contextualises Unsettled, an Australian novel about a convict play, derived from the Irish apocryphal story of The Magistrate of Galway, and documents previously unpublished primary material, including apocryphal stories passed through generations of descendents of settlers, Martin and Maria Lynch, and The Hibernian Father, a play by Irish convict, Edward Geoghegan. It puts forward new hypotheses: that the Irish hero Cuchulain may have provided a template for the archetypal and apocryphal story of the Magistrate of Galway; that disgraced Trinity College medical student and aspiring writer, Edward Geoghegan, enacted and recounted the same father-son archetypal conflict when he was transported to Botany Bay in 1839, and wrote the The Hibernian Father based on the Magistrate of Galway; that working-class Irish families were marginalised in South-east South Australian historical records; that oral apocryphal Lynch stories may be true; that Kate Grenville’s The Secret River (2006) offers an alternative history of the Hawkesbury River settlement, by some definitions apocryphal. The mystery of Geoghegan’s disappearance is solved, and knowledge about his life increased. French theorist Gerard Genette’s notion, advanced in Palimpsests: Literature in the Second Degree (1997), of all novels being transtextual, provides a model for the analysis of relationships between these key apocryphal texts.

Draws on scholarship from leading figures in the field and spans Australian literary history from colonial origins, indigenous and migrant literatures, as well as representations of Asia and the Pacific and the role of literary culture in modern Australian society.

After the Celebration explores Australian fiction from 1989 to 2007, after Australia's bicentenary to the end of the Howard government. In this literary history, Ken Gelder and Paul Salzman combine close attention to Australian novels with a vivid depiction of their contexts: cultural, social, political, historical, national and transnational. From crime fiction to the postmodern colonial novel, from Australian grunge to 'rural apocalypse fiction', from the Asian diasporic novel to the action blockbuster, Gelder and Salzman show how Australian novelists such as Frank Moorhouse, Elizabeth Jolley, Peter Carey, Kim Scott, Steven Carroll, Kate Grenville, Tim Winton, Alexis Wright and many others have used their work to chart our position in the world. The literary controversies over history, identity, feminism and gatekeeping are read against the politics of the day. Provocative and compelling, After the Celebration captures the key themes and issues in Australian fiction: where we have been and what we have become.