ideaswithanne.com The Secret River articles the Conversation
https://search.app/dPoCFWpvwx7dND3Y7
Grenville’s novel sparked controversy when it was published. The play reopens these contentious questions about who can tell the story of our shared history. Should it be historians or novelists, Indigenous or non-Indigenous storytellers?
Intriguing dance of history and fiction
https://theconversation.com/on-the-frontier-the-intriguing-dance-of-history-and-fiction-40326
Let me describe this dance – this intertwining of history and fiction in a quest for understanding – as it has shaped debates about violence and dispossession on the Australian frontier over the past century.
From the 1930s it was novelists who led the way in imagining the other side of the Australian frontier.
Eleanor Dark (1901-1985) was probably Australia’s most influential historical writer in the 20th century. Her trilogy of historical novels, especially the first volume, The Timeless Land(1941), grew out of long hours of research in the Mitchell Library
Twenty years after the publication of a novel about her forebears, The Generations of Men (1959), she returned to her family story and transformed that semi-fictional pastoral saga into a dispassionate and deeply researched history called The Cry for the Dead (1981). Her book gave a secure scholarly foundation to the political campaign of the Aboriginal Treaty Committee.
I think this turn to history is a fascinating moment in the career of a great writer.
By the late 1990s, frontier conflict had become accepted in Australian historiography and there was a conservative backlash, seeking to discredit a generation of research.
Conservative critics initiated a fight over footnotes and tried to count the precise number of Aboriginal and settler dead on the frontier as if it decided the ethics of the issue.
It was the moral vacuum created by this critique that invited, indeed demanded, works such as Mark McKenna’s Looking for Blackfellas’ Point (2002), Inga Clendinnen’s Dancing with Strangers (2003), and Kate Grenville’s The Secret River (2005), all published in the early 2000s, and all stories that aimed to remind us of the intimacy and familiarity of the frontier, of its visceral, violent reality, and also of its alternative human possibilities.
These three books, two of history, one of fiction, sought to enlarge our capacity for compassion, to win back ground for tolerance and understanding.
Grenville’s commentary on her novel addressed this context directly. “The voice of debate might stimulate the brain”, she declared in 2005, “the dry voice of ‘facts’ might make us comfortable, even relaxed. It takes the voice of fiction to get the feet walking in a new direction.”
Thus Grenville unwittingly found herself in the middle of a debate that goes to the heart of the discipline of history, that matters very much in public affairs, and that was fundamentally not about her.
This debate over The Secret River concealed the sympathy and symbiosis that generally exists between history and fiction.
History and fiction journey together and separately into the past; they are a tag team, sometimes taking turns, sometimes working in tandem. They can be uneasy partners, but they are also magnetically drawn to one another in the quest for deeper understanding.
History doesn’t own truth, and fiction doesn’t own imagination, but there are times when the differences between history and fiction are very important indeed. At such times it is incumbent on historians – those who choose at certain moments to write history – to insist and reflect on the distinction.
Such explanations should not be misinterpreted as defending territory.
What can historical fiction accomplish ?
https://lithub.com/what-can-historical-fiction-accomplish-that-history-does-not/
Historical fiction is defined as movies and novels in which a story is made up but is set in the past and sometimes borrows true characteristics of the time period in which it is set
But for our own purposes, we need a better definition. Even the assertion that the story is “set in the past” is problematic, because we have yet to define what the past is, a potentially futile task given the possibility that the past—a past—may not even exist.
So let us agree, for now, that the past is that which is recognized by the present. The present sees the past, but the past does not see the present, because a past that saw a present would actually be a present seeing a future, which is—as far as definitions go—impossible.
The past—whatever it is—is good. The present is strange, and to be honest, there isn’t much of it.
Writing is the form that best mimics our experience of life
Why add a fiction book to the library of extant material? After all, are not historical accounts books?
The first has to deal with perceptions of truth.
Writers of fiction look for the bits that distort, and color, and qualify—that raise all sorts of questions where there were once answers. And all the other reasons to write historical fiction gather neatly here, where we tread into the more obvious: that historical fiction—like a spider at its web—thrives in the blank spaces between known and known, supplying plausible filler; that historical fiction tells stories through created personal perspectives; that historical fiction gives voice to previously underrepresented populations. These are powerful, worthy, interesting reasons to write novels and short stories inspired by historical subject matter, but perhaps not particularly curious.
So my first response as to why historical fiction is necessary is that material truth does not matter to the writer.
The other compelling reason to write historical fiction is its ability to perform. Fiction takes historical figures—significant or not—and turns them into actors
Historical fiction allows us to read about things that we know, but it also allows us to not know these same things. In this way, historical fiction most closely represents how the stuff of history happens. We write and read as we live, filled with possibility, and although we may progress to recognizable events, we—like the characters—do not know who we will be when we get there.
Black convicts. Casting a spotlight on the Black convicts of African descent who helped shape Australia
Santilla Chingaipe’s new book brings a fresh and urgent perspective to bear on Australian history. But in countering misrepresentations she overlooks existing s…
The Conversation
https://search.app/7WpNVwzUk4RGkMG39
Read this podcast
https://open.spotify.com/episode/3sgTtSYIA5OLjAscHQoiSk?si=qJN5-2U7RLak6uI2Chp7Cw&t=978
https://www.artshub.com.au/news/reviews/book-review-black-convicts-santilla-chingaipe-2764777/
The best Australian historical fiction, as recommended by Weatherglass Novella Award-winning writer Kate Kruimink.
Source: Five Books
The Best Australian Historical Fiction – Five Books Expert Recommendations