![]() ![]() ![]() The Secret River is rich and alive with metaphor: the coldness, hardness and immovability of stone and rock the dogs, everywhere dogs – a bitch lying down and letting her pups suck the life out of her, “the dark curl of dog turd”, “a pack of dogs snapping at a hen with chicks”, skinny dogs, dogs barking at a pitch that is “high and hysterical” like frantic, slobbering slave dogs in a bayou pursuit.īesides that, William Thornhill is not a character only of the past. I can taste the ash in Sarah’s damper, the rot in the salt pork and the bitterness of the black tea. When Thornhill sees a sack hanging heavy on the end of a rope from a tree on Smasher’s patch, I hear Billie Holiday’s Strange Fruit, “black bodies swinging in the southern breeze”. ![]() Grenville’s tense, sweeping story of Thornhill, his wife, Sarah, their grim, foul London lives, his transportation for the term of his natural life, the river, its characters – including the vile Smasher – the land on the river, and the psychopathic violence with which its Aboriginal owners are evicted, is shocking, riveting, vivid, sensory.Īs ticket-of-leave man Thornhill and Sarah carve out their place on a “mild-mannered point”, an image of Frederick McCubbin’s painting The Pioneer flashes to mind. The Secret River is rich and alive with metaphor: the coldness, hardness and immovability of stone and rock the dogs, everywhere dogs. ![]()
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