Reading The Secret River : whiteness, nation, belonging

This paper takes the novel The Secret River as the basis for analysing whiteness as structure of authority and being white in Australia. Kate Grenville’s novel provides a fictionalised account of early invasion and settlement on the Hawkesbury River, north of Sydney, and the interactions of white invaders/settlers (mainly pardoned convicts with land grants) and the local Aboriginal people living in the area. In 2011, racialised relations in Australia between white (Anglo) Australians and Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders are in many ways still/inevitably fraught. Understanding and deconstructing these relationships in their historicised context is integral to intervening in and shifting entrenched positionings that keep denial and racism alive and well. Grenville’s novel could be said to explore the fragility of being white, simultaneously as whiteness as a structure of authority is laying down its roots in the Australian soil of the early 1800s. The analysis presented in this paper takes up this story as a contribution to historicising, understanding and deconstructing racialised relations in Australia today. The paper is part autobiography, part reportage, part analysis and part experiment - an experiment in capturing invasion as the foundation for belonging/not belonging, in a white-dominated white-settler state