Searching for the Secret River

Kate Grenville's novel The Secret Rivermoved and exhilarated many people when it was published in 2005. Readers marvelled at the subtlety of its language, and the power of Grenville's story-telling. And they recognised that this simple tale of a poor convict family settling on the banks of the Hawkesbury River in the early nineteenth century represented a landmark moment in Australian fiction. Grenville had taken the novel to the frontier of European settlement and written a profoundly original and disturbing work about what happened there. Searching for the Secret Riveris the extraordinary story of how Kate Grenville came to write her award-winning novel. It all begins with her ancestor Solomon Wiseman, transported to New South Wales for the term of his natural life, but who later became a wealthy man and built his colonial mansion on the Hawkesbury. Increasingly obsessed with his story, Grenville pursues him from Sydney to London and back, and then up the Hawkesbury itself.