History and Fiction

In late 2006, not long after The Secret River was published, two Australian historians (Mark McKenna and Inga Clendinnen) published essays in which they suggested that "Grenville sees her novel as a work of history". This suggestion is incorrect and unfounded, but it was presented forcefully by historians who are widely respected, and since then it has unfortunately become a kind of public phantom that continues to misrepresent what I said and what I think.

McKenna's was the first piece to appear and seems to have given Clendinnen her arguments, so I'll deal with that first. My detailed response to Clendinnen's essay appears after that, below.

 

McKenna begins his article by talking about the rise of the historical novel and the fact that "at the same time, scholarly history is becoming harder to publish". He claims that "The boundaries between history and fiction have blurred", and that in the recent history wars, "History has been the great loser…historians have lost much of their earlier cultural authority."
 
In other words, he sees a battle going on between history and fiction, in which historians (such as himself ) are coming out the losers. Not surprisingly, he doesn’t think this is a good thing. He sets out to defend history against the encroachments of the historical novel.
 
It’s in the context of this underlying conviction that he looks at public comments I've made about The Secret River. Essentially, he trawls through newspaper articles and radio interviews looking for evidence to back up his point of view. He ignores my own extensive, unambiguous and easily-accessed comments about what I thought I was doing with history and fiction.  These were  available on my website at the time, and clearly stated in the front and back of all editions of The Secret River .  In his piece he doesn't quote even one phrase from these other, more reliable sources.  
 
Instead he cherry-picks from various interviews I gave about the book – some of them to newspaper writers ( see the essay "Academic Fictions" on this website on newspaper articles) and some on radio. In these comments I’m at pains to spell out the fact that, on the one hand, I drew heavily on historical events and characters, but that, on the other, I was changing them for my own novelistic purposes. At no time did I ever make the claim to be writing any kind of history.
 
But – because McKenna has a point he wants to make about history and fiction - he quotes virtually anything I've said that includes the words "history" or "veracity" and so on.  He gathers this patchwork of partial quotes and stitches them together as if they're making the claim he wants me to be making. 
 
In spite of all this ingenious cutting and stitching, he still can't put between quotes any statement from me that I think I'm writing history. If such a sentence existed, he would most certainly quote it. 
 
He finally declares "If ever there was a case of a novelist wanting her work to be taken seriously as history, it is Grenville." This assertion is only made possible by all those quotes from me that use some version of the word "history" to create a sort of cloud of "history-words". But it remains just that: an assertion.
 
It's difficult to talk about a book set in 1815, the research I did for it, and the real events that were its inspiration, without using that word. Unless a writer of historical fiction says (as Peter Carey did about The True History of the Kelly Gang)  "I made it all up!", there is going to be discussion of the idea of "history".
 
 There's also going to be discussion of how ( or whether) a writer of fiction tries to create a convincing world. If a writer of fiction doesn't care about anachronisms or being faithful to "real events", that's easy. But if, like me, a writer wants to take the past (as illuminated by historians and other scholars)  as the basis for fiction,  then there's going to be discussion about that established history and how close the fiction is to it. 
 
But this is a world away from claiming to write "History". 
 
However, McKenna began with an argument he wanted to make: essentially "history is having problems and it must be fiction's fault". (In fact, of course, fiction is just doing what it's always done.  It's the discipline of history that's going through an unfinished revolution at the moment.)  My novel and my comments seemed to offer him the opportunity to make his argument in a dramatic way.  It had to be dramatic; as he says, historians sometimes find it hard to get published, so making a startling claim about a well-known novel and a well-known novelist increased the chances of his own piece reaching the public.
 
He can be fairly sure that no-one but the novelist herself will know that the claim was never made.  How many of his readers are likely to consult the archives of the newspapers he quotes, or find the BBC or ABC interviews and carefully listen to what I said?  
 
In the final analysis,  McKenna's interpretation isn’t about what I said concerning the process of writing a novel. It's about McKenna and the argument he wants to make about the rivalry he perceives between his discipline and mine.
 
McKenna's essay has been published several times and reached a wide readership in mainstream publications.  It's given rise to another even more colourful and even less-scrupulously-sourced essay (Clendinnen's - she simply re-asserts McKenna's claims as if they were fact) that's reached more readers still.  From these, a "public phantom" has been born in the minds of people who've never read either essay, let alone the sources on which it's supposedly based: that Kate Grenville thinks she's writing history, and is part of the movement to supplant historians. 
 
McKenna began his piece by regretting the difficulty of historians' work reaching the public.  His essay has well and truly succeeded in doing that. The sad thing is that it's done so by flouting some of the very qualities about history as an academic discipline - its open-mindedness and care to represent sources and opinions in an honest way -  that are the source of its enduring authority.  
 

 Since McKenna's article  appeared, many other articles have quoted it (or the Clendinnen piece it spawned) or paraphrased it without, it seems, checking the original sources.  In the many references to the assertion that I think I'm writing history,  it's striking that no-one is able to directly quote me making the claim;  each time the argument is based on unsupported assertion or distorted paraphrasing.  The one direct quote that's used ( the "stepladder" image, detailed below) turns out, when quoted in full, to establish the opposite.  It spells out that, while I am an interested onlooker to the work of historians, history is not what I do.

None of this would be worth protesting about  if it were not for the fact that this fabricated controversy has (in Australia, at least) largely replaced discussion of the books themselves, and the issues they raise about our post-colonial present as well as our colonial past. 

Artists have always taken aspects of the real world and shaped them for their purposes. Did Monet's water-lilies really look as they appear in his paintings? Story-tellers have taken historical figures and events as a starting-point for their work since before Homer and continuing through Shakespeare, Dickens and a thousand others. 

Our human past  - recorded only partially in the historical record - needs to be looked at through many different kinds of windows: through archaeology, through history... and through fiction.  The past is a large and generous house in which I think there's plenty of room for all of us. 

 

Inga Clendinnen's essay appeared in Quarterly Essay (Black Inc, Melbourne), issue 23. My response appeared in issue 25 of Quarterly Essay and is reproduced here with the kind permission of the editor.

"I'm a great admirer of Inga Clendinnen's writing and found The History Question full of the insights and thoughtfulness that characterise all her work. She spends some time discussing The Secret River, and I'm glad of the opportunity to make a few comments about that aspect of her essay.

Clendinnen isn't the only historian to think that I regard The Secret River as history, and that I claim for it the authority of history: Mark McKenna (mentioned by Clendinnen in her essay) led the charge a few months ago. Clendinnen paraphrases McKenna's argument when she says, "Grenville discovered she could write history after all. The novel is a serious attempt to do history… Grenville sees her novel as a work of history…" Although Clendinnen gives no source for this claim, it could well have come from McKenna's piece, so in this reply I'll refer to his essay as well as hers.

Both McKenna's essay and Clendinnen's quote me as claiming to have written history - and in fact to have written better history than historians. However, the quotes that they use have been narrowly selected, taken out of context, and truncated. They don't represent what I actually think. But, like Chinese Whispers, those "quotes" are now being quoted by others - and for this reason I'd like to put the record straight.

Here it is in plain words: I don't think The Secret River is history - it's a work of fiction. Like much fiction, it had its beginnings in the world, but those beginnings have been adapted and altered to various degrees for the sake of the fiction.

Nor did I ever say that I thought my novel was history. In fact, on countless occasions I was at pains to make it clear that I knew it wasn't.

Perhaps the most accessible of these sources is the Acknowledgements in the back of the book itself, containing this statement:

"One of my ancestors gave me the basis for certain details in the early life of William Thornhill, and other characters share some qualities with historical figures. All the people within these pages, however, are works of fiction.

In the course of research I consulted countless documents… and adapted them for my imaginative purposes. Readers of, for example, the Old Bailey transcripts for 1806, and the Governor's dispatches from early Sydney, may recognise a few lines. I acknowledge with gratitude the work of others in making such resources available to a writer of fiction."

(By these "others", of course I mainly meant historians.)

On my website (updated with this material in August 2005 and hard to miss on Google) I went into more detail about what I thought I'd done:

"This book isn't history, but it's solidly based on history. Most of the events in the book "really happened" and much of the dialogue is what people really said or wrote.

Whenever possible I based events in the book on recorded historical events, adapting and changing them as necessary. Thornhill's first meeting with the Aboriginal people on the Hawkesbury is based on a similar incident involving the first Governor, Captain Arthur Phillip. The incident in which Captain McCallum fails to ambush a group of Aboriginal people is based on many accounts of similar failures by the military. The Proclamation which gives settlers permission to shoot Aboriginal people is taken verbatim from Governor Macquarie's Proclamation of 1816. The massacre scene is based on eyewitness accounts of the Waterloo Creek killings in 1838.

Some characters are also loosely based on historical figures, and some of their dialogue is taken from their own mouths [there follow some examples of this].

It was important to me that the incidents and characters were solidly based on history, but as a novelist I drew on these historical sources loosely, as a starting-point for the work of the imagination. The final events and characters meld many historical references together - they're fiction, but they're based on fact."

I'm sorry that my adaptation of historical sources has caused Inga Clendinnen to "flinch" - but it's what fiction writers do: take the world and modify it. I've always made it clear, though, that I have modified it. I've spelled out my awareness that I'm writing fiction, not history.

Of course, it would have been simpler to answer all questions about The Secret River in the way Clendinnen describes Peter Carey doing when interviewed about The True History of the Kelly Gang: by saying flatly, unanswerably: "I made it up."

But I was interested in trying to do something a little more nuanced than that: to acknowledge the complex relationship, backwards and forwards across an invisible line, between the world of fiction and the world inhabited by living people. In talking about the book in public, I was trying to describe my own journey around that line.

There are plenty of easily-accessible sources, then, for historians to consult in order to find out what I thought I was doing in The Secret River. But these aren't the sources Clendinnen or McKenna have chosen to quote. Instead, they use a newspaper story and a radio interview.

Better than most, historians would know that conclusions are only as reliable as the sources on which they're based. They would be aware, too, of the limitations of the kinds of sources they've used.

First, the context of these interviews: readers (and thus interviewers for book pages and programmes) are interested in the fiction-making process and often want to know "where do you get your ideas?" For a historical novel, they also want to know "how much of it is based on fact?" In other words, the context of my remarks was always that of a writer of fiction answering the question "how did you write this novel?" My answer was that I wasn't writing history, but I wasn't inventing incidents and details out of thin air, either.

In interviews I explained, much as I did on my website quoted above, that I'd taken events from the historical record and shifted their time and place, and that I'd ascribed to one man things that were actually done by another man. I told audiences the different dates, I spelled out the different locations. I made it clear that I'd used the historical record, but that I'd freely adapted it for my purposes, and that although many of the events I describe "really happened", they didn't happen to a man called William Thornhill in 1816, because he's a fictional construction. In dozens of interviews I was scrupulous in making a distinction between what's described in the historical record and how I'd departed from it.

One of these interviews was with Ramona Koval, in a programme quoted by Clendinnen. I talked about the "experiential research" I did in order to write The Secret River, and how I used empathy - "What would I have done in that situation?" - to try to construct characters. Clendinnen suggests that this is very poor history, because "Grenville would not have been Grenville in that situation."

I agree - this would be poor history indeed. But these weren't the comments of someone claiming to be doing history and describing how she went about historical research. The context for my remarks about empathy was that Koval had asked me to read a passage from the novel, which included mention of "thole-pins" (an old form of rowlocks). Our conversation began with her inviting me to talk about that aspect of the novel: "I think anybody listening to that must be particularly impressed with the language and the technicalities of the work of the lighterman turned sailor, I suppose, in the colonies. How did you find these ways to express this kind of work?" In other words, this wasn't a question about how to write history: it was a question to a novelist about how she'd written her work of fiction. The context of my remarks about empathy - to which Clendinnen takes such exception - wasn't that of someone explaining how they did history, but someone explaining how they did fiction.

A significant limitation of interviews as a reliable source for debate is that interviews are made on the run. Even politicians, those masters of the one-liner, have been known to get it wrong under those conditions. How much more will writers, who often became writers in the first place because they're not particularly quick on their feet?

Clendinnen (and McKenna before her) quotes from the same radio interview, in which I used the now-infamous "stepladder" image. Their reading of this extract is that I'm claiming a superiority for fiction over history: that fiction is "further up the ladder."

As her final question that day, with the ABC clock sweeping towards the end of our time in our separate studios, Ramona asked me: "So where would you put your book, finally, if you were laying out books on the history wars? Whereabouts would you slot yours?"

With the history warriors Windschuttle and Reynolds - the massacre denialists and the massacre acknowledgers - in the front of my mind, I answered: "Mine would be up on a ladder, looking down at the history wars. [The website transcript of this, until recently corrected, was "looking down on the history wars" but the audio is clearly "at" - a small but significant distinction.] I think the historians, and rightly so, have battled away about the details of exactly when and where and how many and how much, and they've got themselves into these polarised positions, and that's fine, I think that's what historians ought to be doing; constantly questioning the evidence and perhaps even each other. But a novelist can stand up on a stepladder and look down at this, outside the fray, [emphasis in original audio] and say there is another way to understand it. …That's what I hope this book will be. It stands outside that polarised conflict and says look, this is a problem we really need, as a nation, to come to grips with. The historians are doing their thing, but let me as a novelist come to it in a different way, which is the way of empathising and imaginative understanding of those difficult events. Basically to think, well, what would I have done in that situation, and what sort of a person would that make me?"

Written down and read in cold blood, and without the extra dimension given by tone of voice, this certainly ain't Einstein. But I think it's clear that the stepladder image wasn't being used to imply superiority. The concept I was reaching for was to do with being different from the historians, perched up high on a removed vantage-point where I could watch, but not be involved. My book - because it's a novel - is outside the "history wars", irrelevant to them. As a novelist, I'm just an interested onlooker who made the mistake of climbing a stepladder rather than a couple of fruit-boxes to get a good view.

I think that comes through pretty unmistakably, but I recognise that the stepladder image might be seen to contain an ambiguity I didn't intend. If I'd been quietly sitting at my desk writing (and then revising at leisure) for Quarterly Essay, I'd have used a different one. However, there's no chance to revise on air.

The fact that this quickly-grabbed image is the one that's being used again and again by historians indicates that this is the only support they can muster for their claim that I think fiction is superior to history. It strikes me as a pretty flimsy support for such a large claim.

Let me go on record now as saying that I don't think - and never have thought - that fiction is superior to history, much less that my own novel is superior to the work of historians.

In his essay "Writing the Past", Mark McKenna seems to have been the one to initiate the idea that I claim to be writing history rather than fiction - an idea that Clendinnen then extends. In support of this argument McKenna quotes the "stepladder" image from the Ramona Kovall interview, plus a few stories written for daily newspapers. These are feature pieces and news stories by journalists incorporating brief quotes or paraphrased remarks from me. They're not verbatim transcripts, they don't contain extended quotes, and I didn't see them before publication.

However, these sketchy and partial quotes and paraphrases are the only evidence that McKenna has produced for his claim that I think my novel is history. This is the claim that Clendinnen repeats when she says "Grenville sees her novel as a work of history". Those newspaper stories are being asked to bear a burden for which they were never intended - to accurately represent my views on a complex subject.

This is by no means to criticise those journalists or their stories. It's to recognise the limitation of the form itself and its context as an ephemeral piece for a daily paper. The problem is not in the pieces themselves, but in the fact that they've been used inappropriately - they've been taken uncritically, at face value, as authoritative evidence.

Much more accurate, considered material was easily available - for example the long piece on my website. I'm surprised that historians are basing such an important argument on these newspaper stories while other sources - ones that give a very different view - are being ignored.

I've also been surprised by the scornful, mocking tone of the historians' discussions of The Secret River. Historians have every right to doubt the value of historical fiction, and to dislike any particular example of it. But personalising the discussion seems to go beyond a fruitful debate about the roles of history and fiction.

I recently heard an interview with Amanda Lohrey in which she mentioned her dislike for historical fiction because it's "bogus", and next day I read Henry James' comments in a similar vein, as quoted by Clendinnen. I share much of their distrust of historical fiction and am as uncomfortable as they are with the sleight-of-hand used by the historical novelist.

In fact, The Secret River started life not as a historical novel but as a book of non-fiction - I'd planned a kind of loose biography of my convict ancestor. When I realised - for various reasons and with some dismay - that I was writing a historical novel, I came up with a way of reconciling myself to my uneasiness about that genre. I decided to write a second book to accompany the novel: one in which I'd show where the history ended and the fiction began in The Secret River - a record of the writing process, and of the thinking that lay behind it. Rather than hiding behind the sleight-of-hand of the novelist, I'd try to make the process transparent (in the same way I later attempted to do in interviews). So, concurrently with the novel, I worked on that second book, which has now been published: Searching for the Secret River.

It's a book in which I've tried to explore something of what happens when the novelist's imagination works on the world around them - a world which includes history and historical sources. Readers often ask novelists "is your work autobiographical?" and most novelists hate the question because the answer can be both yes and no. Teasing out the nuances of the yes-ness and the no-ness is a complicated business. In Searching for the Secret River, I've tried to do a similar kind of teasing-out about sources, and to acknowledge both my debt to history (and historians) and the ways I've departed from it, and why.

Clendinnen opens her chapter on The Secret River with the image of history and fiction jogging along together on adjacent tracks in an amicable way. Now, she says, novelists "have been doing their best to bump historians off the track." I've never wished to challenge historians' right to their track, and I've always assumed that their footing on it was, in any case, unshakably secure.

In my view, novelists are just doing what we've always done - taking aspects of the world and turning them into stories - and are taking up much the same space on the tracks that we always have. There are many and varied tracks back into the past, and my feeling is that there's plenty of room on them for all of us."

Kate Grenville, January 2007

 In the next issue of Quarterly Essay, Clendinnen published a response to my response Her second article is even more florid in its comments, and in it she manipulates sources and quotes with even less concern for truth. 
 
  This is my response to that second article (unpublished, since QE allows only one round of correspondence).
 
 

“In her reply, Inga Clendinnen takes me to task for a lack of awareness of context and complexity in black-white frontier relations.   As a non-historian I’m the first to agree that my understanding is incomplete. However, her argument depends on a use of sources that amounts to falsification. In the interests of accuracy I’d like to restore them somewhat.

 
She uses as her example the “old man and the stolen spade” event quoted in Searching for the Secret River, quoting my puzzlement when reading Captain Phillip’s account of it as proof that I don’t understand historical context. A historian, she says, (unlike a novelist) would question Phillip’s use of the word “stole” to describe what happened.
 
What she doesn’t mention is that over the 20 pages of Searching following the puzzlement she quotes, I do exactly that: I put Phillip’s account in context.  I consider indigenous culture in relation to owning, exchange and other forms of transaction.   I question the idea of “theft”. As she would know, at the end of that learning process I return to the scene:
 
“Thinking back to that scene with Governor Phillip and the man he’d slapped, I still didn’t understand it. But I could see now that there were whole grammars of behaviour, dictionaries of culture, that would make sense of the old man’s actions. Things to do with the protocols of being a guest and a host, with giving and taking, with respect and authority. I was appalled at the misunderstanding that must have happened in that moment, even though all parties had only goodwill towards each other. How easy it was for things to go wrong. Once they’d gone wrong, how hard to put right.”
 
 
More serious than Clendinnen’s partial representation of my own words, though, is her partial representation of the historical sources. 
 
  As further evidence of my ignorance of historical context, Clendinnen mentions the puzzling fact that the old man didn’t spear Phillip, after Phillip slapped him in punishment for "stealing" the spade. “Why?” she asks. “Does “Phillip” – or whoever it is [the Aboriginal man] takes Phillip to be – stand within a protected relationship? Is it not possible for him to spear him?” She's making the case that historians such as herself know to ask these subtle questions, while novelists simply blunder around trampling on the exquisite eggs of the past. 
 
 Clendinnen has written a book about the first years of colonial Australia, so she must know that there are two accounts of this incident.  One is by Governor Phillip. In his account, it's his courage in facing the "old man" that prevents him being speared.  However,  another eyewitness account exists, and it gives a very different view of the moment - and a straightforward answer to Clendinnen's question.
 
William Bradley records the scene thus: “…after dark the Old Man took an iron spade & was going off with it…the Governor chastised him for it, which so enraged him that he run off & very soon returned with his party all with their spears ready to throw when a Musquet was fired which made them stop & a second Musquet drove them away for the night.” 
 
In other words, there’s a very good reason for the old man not spearing Phillip: he and his companions were being fired on.
 
Either Clendinnen isn't aware of this second version of the incident -  which would make her a poor sort of historian - or, knowing about it, she's pretending it doesn't exist. She's so incensed that a novelist should step onto her territory that she's prepared to manipulate the sources in a way a tabloid journalist might be proud of. 
 
 There’s an important discussion to be had about the roles of fiction and history, and the claims each makes for itself. However, that discussion isn’t well served by such manipulation of sources.” 
 
Kate Grenville, March 2007
 
 

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