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Unsettled: A Journey Through Time and Place
What does it mean to be on land taken from others?
‘What does it mean to be on land that was taken from other people? Now that we know how the taking was done, what do we do with that knowledge?’
Kate Grenville is no stranger to the past. Her success and fame as a writer exploded when she published The Secret River in 2005, a bestseller based on the story of her convict ancestor, an early settler on the Hawkesbury River.
More than two decades on, and following the defeat of the Voice referendum, Grenville is still grappling with what it means to descend from people who were, as she puts it, ‘on the sharp edge of the moving blade that was colonisation’.
So she decides to go on a kind of pilgrimage, back through the places her family stories happened, and put the stories and the First People back into the same frame, on the same country, to try to think about those questions. This gripping book is the result of that journey.
'Grenville's pages are streaked with light … Kate Grenville is, like Kim Scott and Lia Hills here and Percival Everett in the US, turning our faces towards the two dazzlingly contemporary questions central to all of us, Colonisation and Race.'—The Age
'A beautifully written exploration of geography, spirituality and settlement … Grenville is to be celebrated for vulnerably setting forth into our darkest corners, unsettling us all.' —ArtsHub
'Effortless and artful … Unsettled, and the collective memory and identity it invokes, speaks powerfully to a structure of postcolonial feeling within Australian society' —The Conversation
'A gripping, profound look at colonisation that puts First Nations' stories back in the frame.'— Harper's Bazaar
'An unforgettable reimagining and retelling of history that is, in turns, intimate, unsparing – and confronting.' — Good Weekend
'This is a book of deep and complex musings with sharp illuminations – tiny gold nuggets rising up through the hidden sands of time … The book allows the reader space to breathe somewhere between the worlds of fact and fiction, and feel into the space between the past and present. Through her own journey, Grenville gives her readers a road map for a deeper understanding.'— The Australian
‘What does it mean to be on land that was taken from other people? Now that we know how the taking was done, what do we do with that knowledge?’
Kate Grenville is no stranger to the past. Her success and fame as a writer exploded when she published The Secret River in 2005, a bestseller based on the story of her convict ancestor, an early settler on the Hawkesbury River.
More than two decades on, and following the defeat of the Voice referendum, Grenville is still grappling with what it means to descend from people who were, as she puts it, ‘on the sharp edge of the moving blade that was colonisation’.
So she decides to go on a kind of pilgrimage, back through the places her family stories happened, and put the stories and the First People back into the same frame, on the same country, to try to think about those questions. This gripping book is the result of that journey.
'Grenville's pages are streaked with light … Kate Grenville is, like Kim Scott and Lia Hills here and Percival Everett in the US, turning our faces towards the two dazzlingly contemporary questions central to all of us, Colonisation and Race.'—The Age
'A beautifully written exploration of geography, spirituality and settlement … Grenville is to be celebrated for vulnerably setting forth into our darkest corners, unsettling us all.' —ArtsHub
'Effortless and artful … Unsettled, and the collective memory and identity it invokes, speaks powerfully to a structure of postcolonial feeling within Australian society' —The Conversation
'A gripping, profound look at colonisation that puts First Nations' stories back in the frame.'— Harper's Bazaar
'An unforgettable reimagining and retelling of history that is, in turns, intimate, unsparing – and confronting.' — Good Weekend
'This is a book of deep and complex musings with sharp illuminations – tiny gold nuggets rising up through the hidden sands of time … The book allows the reader space to breathe somewhere between the worlds of fact and fiction, and feel into the space between the past and present. Through her own journey, Grenville gives her readers a road map for a deeper understanding.'— The Australian
235 pages, Kindle Edition
Published April 1, 2025
75 people are currently reading
431 people want to read
About the author
Kate Grenville
38 books829 followersKate Grenville is one of Australia's best-known authors. She's published eight books of fiction and four books about the writing process. Her best-known works are the international best-seller The Secret River, The Idea of Perfection, The Lieutenant and Lilian's Story (details about all Kate Grenville's books are elsewhere on this site). Her novels have won many awards both in Australia and the UK, several have been made into major feature films, and all have been translated into European and Asian languages.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 76 reviews
April 20, 2025
Grenville’s book attempts to grapple with the legacy of the colonial dispossession of and violence against Australian First Nations people via a sort of travel memoir. She’s fully aware of the limitations of writing this as a white woman, and that’s kind of the point of it I think - she acknowledges that all of white Australia is implicated in this because “we’ve all benefited from it” and I would argue that she particularly has benefited from it, more than many, as a historical novelist drawing on her own colonial history. But she’s a baby boomer and is coming to it a bit late. She’s writing in good faith, and she has said that she wrote it for people who don’t read history, but it’s a bit surface level for me. Like, it’s all about her feelings. I think I wanted a bit more history, actually. But she’s an incredibly popular author, maybe it’ll reach some people who haven’t thought too much about this subject - I don’t know. It’s decent but not *cutting*. I tend to think her audience is a bit like her? Having said that: my grandmother, born in 1925 and who died a few years ago aged in her 90s, was notoriously pretty racist (and was prepared to argue with my very left-leaning parents about it, more than once), had Grenville’s book about her mother on her shelves at the time of her death. She was quite into Australiana and I can see why that book would have interested her, being about a woman not too much older than her. She’d softened a lot of her views about things like environmentalism in her later years, via engagement with a local (leaning progressive) writers group (she was creative and wrote verse). If she was still around and still reading, this is the kind of thing she might finally have been ready for.
April 26, 2025
“We can’t undo history, but we can’t ignore it either. What do we do, now that we know?”
Unsettled is the seventh non-fiction book by award-winning, best-selling Australian author, Kate Grenville. After writing novels loosely based on her ancestors, Grenville uneasily acknowledges that, with regard to the land stolen from Australia’s First Nations people, her own forebears were, in all probability, part of the problem. She sets off on what she sees as a pilgrimage, a very personal journey, visiting those places mentioned in the handed-down family history, an attempt to look with new eyes.
At each place, she explains the significance to her family’s history, and approaches the episode with open-minded musing about what might really have occurred, when mentions of Aborigines are often glaringly absent in historical accounts.
She regularly checks her own attitude, trying to discern if she is taking the easy path to avoid feeling uncomfortable about those realisations. When she finds herself reassured by the fact that an ancestor owned a pub rather than being a land-thieving squatter, she digs deeper to discover the truth about him, when it has always been easier to look away. More than once she questions what she has been accepting as a well-meaning white person.
Grenville takes a critical look at accepted terminology, analysing the euphemisms and sanitised language used in historical documents (“took up land” sounds much less like stealing it than “took land”) and still today on official signs at historical sites, noting what is omitted and where the language is vague and passive. She also considers the way people name places and properties, often ill-considered appropriations.
She explains exactly how, through the insidious process of Crown possession, grants and leases, the land was “legally” stolen without any treaty ever being made with the First Nations people, who were wrongly classified as nomadic. And with never any consideration of the fact that this land was “already the home – and spiritual identity – of other people.”
She identifies a complicated feeling that happens “when you’ve benefitted from a great wrong but you weren’t the one who actually did it. What we should feel guilt for may not be the stealing itself, but the fact that we keep on refusing to address what the stealing has done.”
She gives the reader some gorgeous descriptive prose: “I pull over and get out, the quiet pouring in like smooth liquid as I stand on the dust of the road. The afternoon sun slants softly, filling the grass with a cloud of radiance. There’s a world of sound here. There’s the whispering of the trees, the quick twittering of birds, the long, sad cry of a crow,, and that almost-too-high-pitched-to-hear insect thrum that you get in the bush once you’re not crashing through it… Standing in the heart of this folded land is like being within a vast living creature, its existence progressing at a slow scale that makes human life a flicker of nothing”, although this definitely doesn’t apply to one significant spot: the carpark of Tamworth’s K-Mart.
Included are several maps of her journey and a handy family tree, all held within some striking cover art by Alex Ross. This candid account is thought provoking, insightful, and important, and should be compulsory reading for every Australian.
This unbiased review is from a copy provided by Black Inc. Publishing
Unsettled is the seventh non-fiction book by award-winning, best-selling Australian author, Kate Grenville. After writing novels loosely based on her ancestors, Grenville uneasily acknowledges that, with regard to the land stolen from Australia’s First Nations people, her own forebears were, in all probability, part of the problem. She sets off on what she sees as a pilgrimage, a very personal journey, visiting those places mentioned in the handed-down family history, an attempt to look with new eyes.
At each place, she explains the significance to her family’s history, and approaches the episode with open-minded musing about what might really have occurred, when mentions of Aborigines are often glaringly absent in historical accounts.
She regularly checks her own attitude, trying to discern if she is taking the easy path to avoid feeling uncomfortable about those realisations. When she finds herself reassured by the fact that an ancestor owned a pub rather than being a land-thieving squatter, she digs deeper to discover the truth about him, when it has always been easier to look away. More than once she questions what she has been accepting as a well-meaning white person.
Grenville takes a critical look at accepted terminology, analysing the euphemisms and sanitised language used in historical documents (“took up land” sounds much less like stealing it than “took land”) and still today on official signs at historical sites, noting what is omitted and where the language is vague and passive. She also considers the way people name places and properties, often ill-considered appropriations.
She explains exactly how, through the insidious process of Crown possession, grants and leases, the land was “legally” stolen without any treaty ever being made with the First Nations people, who were wrongly classified as nomadic. And with never any consideration of the fact that this land was “already the home – and spiritual identity – of other people.”
She identifies a complicated feeling that happens “when you’ve benefitted from a great wrong but you weren’t the one who actually did it. What we should feel guilt for may not be the stealing itself, but the fact that we keep on refusing to address what the stealing has done.”
She gives the reader some gorgeous descriptive prose: “I pull over and get out, the quiet pouring in like smooth liquid as I stand on the dust of the road. The afternoon sun slants softly, filling the grass with a cloud of radiance. There’s a world of sound here. There’s the whispering of the trees, the quick twittering of birds, the long, sad cry of a crow,, and that almost-too-high-pitched-to-hear insect thrum that you get in the bush once you’re not crashing through it… Standing in the heart of this folded land is like being within a vast living creature, its existence progressing at a slow scale that makes human life a flicker of nothing”, although this definitely doesn’t apply to one significant spot: the carpark of Tamworth’s K-Mart.
Included are several maps of her journey and a handy family tree, all held within some striking cover art by Alex Ross. This candid account is thought provoking, insightful, and important, and should be compulsory reading for every Australian.
This unbiased review is from a copy provided by Black Inc. Publishing
June 7, 2025
Thought-provoking and insightful exploration of what it means to live on land stolen from others.
This is a must read for anyone who lives on the land now called Australia, whether newly arrived, or having lived here for generations.
I appreciate the inclusion of the many books that assisted Kate Grenville in her writing of this story.
This is a must read for anyone who lives on the land now called Australia, whether newly arrived, or having lived here for generations.
I appreciate the inclusion of the many books that assisted Kate Grenville in her writing of this story.
August 4, 2025
Kind of boring and a bit too moany.
May 20, 2025
This is my seventh Kate Grenville book. I first read ‘The Idea of Perfection’ in 1999 and have followed her closely since. With Helen Garner, Grenville is in my top five Australian authors. I have listened to her on several occasions at writer festivals.
Like Garner, Grenville is at that stage of her life where has little interest in what other people think. She has a task to do and won’t be sidetracked by others. She mentions parts of her other two books on her family, ‘Restless Dollie Maunder’ and ‘One Life: My Mother’s Story.’
I read ‘The Secret River’ and ‘The Lieutenant’ soon after they were published. I also remember the clash between Ms Grenville and Inga Clendinnen over the authenticity of these stories. From what I remember the disagreement was over stereotyping Aboriginal people. I am not sure but in the recent past it has been described as ‘cultural appropriation’. Can a member of one culture create characters from another culture?
I am an admirer of Inga Cleninnen’s (1934 to 2016) work but in this case, I would side with Grenville. Remember she is writing fiction. If she portrayed the indigenous people as primitive savages, I would say she wouldn’t have an audience. (Racists don’t read!)
This book is the story of a journey, the author’s retracing the settlement patterns of her ancestors from Wiseman’s Ferry to Guyra. It is also a journey in the story of white colonization of Aboriginal land and the subsequent violence committed towards Aboriginal people. It is a journey that many Australians should take. This book has a similar theme to David Marr’s ‘Killing for Country: A Family Story’
I have recently read ‘The Season’ by Helen Garner and I hear the similarities in both their voices, direct, succinct, women who don’t have time for bullshit. There is a calm intensity in the manner of her authorship. She keeps the reader’s attention from the opening scenes at Wisemans Ferry valley to high plains of Guyra.
A powerful and relevant book for Australia in 2025, especially after the failure of the Voice referendum.
Like Garner, Grenville is at that stage of her life where has little interest in what other people think. She has a task to do and won’t be sidetracked by others. She mentions parts of her other two books on her family, ‘Restless Dollie Maunder’ and ‘One Life: My Mother’s Story.’
I read ‘The Secret River’ and ‘The Lieutenant’ soon after they were published. I also remember the clash between Ms Grenville and Inga Clendinnen over the authenticity of these stories. From what I remember the disagreement was over stereotyping Aboriginal people. I am not sure but in the recent past it has been described as ‘cultural appropriation’. Can a member of one culture create characters from another culture?
I am an admirer of Inga Cleninnen’s (1934 to 2016) work but in this case, I would side with Grenville. Remember she is writing fiction. If she portrayed the indigenous people as primitive savages, I would say she wouldn’t have an audience. (Racists don’t read!)
This book is the story of a journey, the author’s retracing the settlement patterns of her ancestors from Wiseman’s Ferry to Guyra. It is also a journey in the story of white colonization of Aboriginal land and the subsequent violence committed towards Aboriginal people. It is a journey that many Australians should take. This book has a similar theme to David Marr’s ‘Killing for Country: A Family Story’
I have recently read ‘The Season’ by Helen Garner and I hear the similarities in both their voices, direct, succinct, women who don’t have time for bullshit. There is a calm intensity in the manner of her authorship. She keeps the reader’s attention from the opening scenes at Wisemans Ferry valley to high plains of Guyra.
A powerful and relevant book for Australia in 2025, especially after the failure of the Voice referendum.
April 21, 2025
Every Australian, whether recently arrived, or descended from five generations, would benefit from read this book.
June 17, 2025
Thank you Kate.
September 8, 2025
What a difficult and important book. A journey of self reflection, consideration, research and humility to reflect on Australia’s true history and what it means for white / new Australians. It’s a struggle I share. The book is eloquent and thoughtful. I just wish that there was more about what we can do now. In addition to considering past wrongs, how do we better inform ourselves about Aboriginal struggles today and the ways we can help reduce racism and enable Aboriginal peoples and cultures to thrive. Maybe that’s a different book?
April 13, 2025
A must read for every Australian.
May 5, 2025
I was unsettled reading this account of Kate grappling with the legacy of her ancestors actions in taking land in NSW from the traditional owners. Obviously I have a different perspective being an immigrant myself. I’m also much more pragmatic- it’s hard to find many nations in the world where this story hasn’t been played out - even to the Neanderthal dna Europeans share. That’s not to say I’m inclined to shrug and say oh well, I honestly believe we need to acknowledge and make restitution but I’m not sure guilt helps.
I was also unsettled by the author who seems to have gone about her journey being miserable and judgemental to the folk she meets on the way. Sneers about family history, or volunteers at community centres, even walkers she meets on the way.
And ultimately I don’t feel that she grapples with her legacy- after all the family seem to have failed at most of their business ventures - or presents any ideas about how to give it back.
I was also unsettled by the author who seems to have gone about her journey being miserable and judgemental to the folk she meets on the way. Sneers about family history, or volunteers at community centres, even walkers she meets on the way.
And ultimately I don’t feel that she grapples with her legacy- after all the family seem to have failed at most of their business ventures - or presents any ideas about how to give it back.
June 9, 2025
I can’t understate the importance of a book like this. It’s this type of introspective deep dive into our own personal background and history that will make a genuine shift in the way people view so called Australia. Real change is possible and it’s through activities like Grenville undertook that it starts
April 19, 2025
“I’m on stolen land, but I can’t give it back because it’s the only home I have.”
How does a beneficiary of colonisation continue to live on stolen land? Kate Grenville explores this question through exploring her own family history of settlement in Australia. We follow Grenville on a road trip as she visits areas in NSW where her distant family had settled and lived over the past 150 years. It is a deeply introspective book, but not in a narcissistic or indulgent way. Grenville explores the racism and falsehoods in stories she has been told about Aboriginal people in her childhood, from her relatives.
I found this book to be uncomfortable to read. Some questions that came up for me:
Am i ok with a descendent of a white settler in Australia pontificating about how Indigenous Australians would have lived and died during the invasion?
Am I ok with Grenville telling Aboriginal stories, visiting sacred Aboriginal sites in order to explore her own family history?
There is no easy answer. Grenville does however explore the above in an insightful manner. Every step of the way she acknowledges that she is white and can not speak for Aboriginal Australians. She acknowledges the genocide of the Aboriginal people and grieves for them when visiting the settled areas her forebears took. She writes this book in the wake of The Voice referendum in Australia, which sought to create an Indigenous voice in parliament, which was devastatingly rejected by the majority of the population. She explains she wrote this book about Aboriginal people, despite being white, because she thinks that the topic of white guilt needs to be looked at if we are to reconcile.
I migrated to Australia in 1989 and share a lot of the uneasy feelings Grenville explores. The knowledge of living on stolen land, benefiting from a genocide that occurred a hundred years ago, and not knowing what to do about it. In the end it is about truth telling. If we don’t listen to and recognise the grief of the past there is no way forward.
How does a beneficiary of colonisation continue to live on stolen land? Kate Grenville explores this question through exploring her own family history of settlement in Australia. We follow Grenville on a road trip as she visits areas in NSW where her distant family had settled and lived over the past 150 years. It is a deeply introspective book, but not in a narcissistic or indulgent way. Grenville explores the racism and falsehoods in stories she has been told about Aboriginal people in her childhood, from her relatives.
I found this book to be uncomfortable to read. Some questions that came up for me:
Am i ok with a descendent of a white settler in Australia pontificating about how Indigenous Australians would have lived and died during the invasion?
Am I ok with Grenville telling Aboriginal stories, visiting sacred Aboriginal sites in order to explore her own family history?
There is no easy answer. Grenville does however explore the above in an insightful manner. Every step of the way she acknowledges that she is white and can not speak for Aboriginal Australians. She acknowledges the genocide of the Aboriginal people and grieves for them when visiting the settled areas her forebears took. She writes this book in the wake of The Voice referendum in Australia, which sought to create an Indigenous voice in parliament, which was devastatingly rejected by the majority of the population. She explains she wrote this book about Aboriginal people, despite being white, because she thinks that the topic of white guilt needs to be looked at if we are to reconcile.
I migrated to Australia in 1989 and share a lot of the uneasy feelings Grenville explores. The knowledge of living on stolen land, benefiting from a genocide that occurred a hundred years ago, and not knowing what to do about it. In the end it is about truth telling. If we don’t listen to and recognise the grief of the past there is no way forward.
July 1, 2025
I went into this book thinking it was going to be about how white Australians can grapple with the fact that we are living on stolen land. I also thought there would be actual solutions as to what we can do to reconcile our history. What I got instead was this white saviour complex book lol.
Okay, so there were some interesting things brought up throughout, but overall, this was not good. Firstly, how can you complain about how white people constantly talk over Indigenous voices and proceed to write a book about your family history in Australia whilst sparingly interweaving some First Nations history when it worked for your narrative??? There was one moment where I had my jaw on the floor, essentially, Grenville tells the experience of Aboriginal people on the land in which she is driving on, and then says, I don't actually know if that's what happened because I am just imagining that's what happened on this land. There are multiple instances of this throughout the book and its like LADY, you can't just make up history to fit the narrative you're trying to push.
Speaking of the narrative she's trying to push - essentially the whole book is like: my great great grandad was a horrible person yet I feel so connected to the land he walked on, even though it was stolen but feel sorry for me because I'm having this moral dilemma about feeling a connection to land that was never mine in the first place. Like what? She is self-aware enough to call out some of her white-washing behaviour, yet can't seem to understand that this whole book is just a white woman using First Nations history and Aboriginal oppression to tell a story about her family's history (one that she is directly benefitting from btw, alot more so that others, her relatives didn't just settle here, they PHYSICALLY stole land of its Indigenous owners and killed them when they tried to claim it back.. but I digress)
Literally NO solutions were brought to the table in this book for people who actually want to reckon with the fact that we are all benefiting from stolen land, nor what we can do to pay the rent.
No quotes, listened on audio.
Okay, so there were some interesting things brought up throughout, but overall, this was not good. Firstly, how can you complain about how white people constantly talk over Indigenous voices and proceed to write a book about your family history in Australia whilst sparingly interweaving some First Nations history when it worked for your narrative??? There was one moment where I had my jaw on the floor, essentially, Grenville tells the experience of Aboriginal people on the land in which she is driving on, and then says, I don't actually know if that's what happened because I am just imagining that's what happened on this land. There are multiple instances of this throughout the book and its like LADY, you can't just make up history to fit the narrative you're trying to push.
Speaking of the narrative she's trying to push - essentially the whole book is like: my great great grandad was a horrible person yet I feel so connected to the land he walked on, even though it was stolen but feel sorry for me because I'm having this moral dilemma about feeling a connection to land that was never mine in the first place. Like what? She is self-aware enough to call out some of her white-washing behaviour, yet can't seem to understand that this whole book is just a white woman using First Nations history and Aboriginal oppression to tell a story about her family's history (one that she is directly benefitting from btw, alot more so that others, her relatives didn't just settle here, they PHYSICALLY stole land of its Indigenous owners and killed them when they tried to claim it back.. but I digress)
Literally NO solutions were brought to the table in this book for people who actually want to reckon with the fact that we are all benefiting from stolen land, nor what we can do to pay the rent.
No quotes, listened on audio.
June 29, 2025
Yep this is a book that I’ve been waiting to come along; a ‘white fella’ (Grenville settles on balanda and explains why) interrogating her own history, aligned with visiting places from her family’s past in NSW. It is very well written, of course, and while I found the first third a bit ‘slow’, I was completely engaged by the end and appreciated her thoughtful and connected trip through country to prompt her to look more deeply at how we got here, physically and metaphorically. I really liked her deeper analysis of the words we use and putting them in italics made me think more deeply too. Her descriptions and exposure of how land was ‘taken up’ during 19th and even 20th centuries was shocking and raw and even though I know and understand land was stolen, it was really such an indictment to understand the details of how it happened. Excellent and interesting and powerful introspective read. She doesn’t mention or talk about reparations tho, and so seems ultimately ‘lily livered’? Some of the descriptions were fab…Im still hearing the rain ‘chickering’ in the gutters.
P.50 “the great humming silence of this landscape”
It touched me as it was timely reading for me, after reading Killing for Country and undertaking my own powerfully evocative road trip recently. I appreciate its contribution to a small but hopefully growing genre that leads to real change and justice in this country.
P.50 “the great humming silence of this landscape”
It touched me as it was timely reading for me, after reading Killing for Country and undertaking my own powerfully evocative road trip recently. I appreciate its contribution to a small but hopefully growing genre that leads to real change and justice in this country.
August 8, 2025
In this book, Kate Grenville tackles the challenging topic of grappling with the atrocities committed by European settlers towards Aboriginal people when you are descended from European settlers. The author sets out on a kind of pilgrimage through the landscape of her family stories and spends time reflecting on the ways in which Aboriginal people would have been impacted by the actions of her forebears. The discussion of wording and place names, and how word choice can obscure the actions of people causing harm or can hide deeper meanings, was particularly interesting. At times, the author was dismissive of her own reflections and actions as being “silly” or a waste of time, which was frustrating to read. This was otherwise a really interesting book and I would recommend it.
July 27, 2025
Unsettled by Kate Grenville
The added words on the front cover of this incredible non fiction book state ‘a journey through time and place’, certainly a true statement. I inhaled this book from beginning to end, and felt it very relatable and relevant.
The chapters are short and sharp and the author is very clear with her own feelings and explanations. I enjoyed the way she doesn’t push guilt on the invaders, but leaves it to the reader to make their own decisions on what happened in the past. The question asked is one I ask myself often. ‘What is it that I, as a non indigenous person in Australia, can do to acknowledge the violence involved in taking land in that time period?’. There are no clear answers to the question but this book is a great guide to think about the wrongs of the past.
I’m an avid post it note person, and Unsettled is full of paragraphs or sentences marked with a post it, that really got to me. One is when Kate returns to Balls Head in Sydney, to revisit an ancient engraving of a whale. Looking at it and what it means, thinking of how many people had stood where she stood now, over hundreds of years, she had clarity – she is standing on stolen land. I found this particularly moving.
Another time Kate takes us to the Convict Road, near the Hawkesbury River, and a memorial board, saying how marvellous it was that hardworking convicts created a national treasure called the Great North Road. Kate shares a great talking point in reminding the reader that building that road added to the dispossession of the First Nations people who had been living there, the Darkinjung people. Her writings remind us that in Australia no treaty was ever made or signed, there was no negotiation or acknowledgement that First Nations people were already living here.
So many good things to discuss like context, the use of Indigenous names on land that wasn’t ever purchased in a legal way. I could go on but I won’t, you can tell I loved the book. Please read it and tell me what you think. Another book that could be a text in high schools.
The added words on the front cover of this incredible non fiction book state ‘a journey through time and place’, certainly a true statement. I inhaled this book from beginning to end, and felt it very relatable and relevant.
The chapters are short and sharp and the author is very clear with her own feelings and explanations. I enjoyed the way she doesn’t push guilt on the invaders, but leaves it to the reader to make their own decisions on what happened in the past. The question asked is one I ask myself often. ‘What is it that I, as a non indigenous person in Australia, can do to acknowledge the violence involved in taking land in that time period?’. There are no clear answers to the question but this book is a great guide to think about the wrongs of the past.
I’m an avid post it note person, and Unsettled is full of paragraphs or sentences marked with a post it, that really got to me. One is when Kate returns to Balls Head in Sydney, to revisit an ancient engraving of a whale. Looking at it and what it means, thinking of how many people had stood where she stood now, over hundreds of years, she had clarity – she is standing on stolen land. I found this particularly moving.
Another time Kate takes us to the Convict Road, near the Hawkesbury River, and a memorial board, saying how marvellous it was that hardworking convicts created a national treasure called the Great North Road. Kate shares a great talking point in reminding the reader that building that road added to the dispossession of the First Nations people who had been living there, the Darkinjung people. Her writings remind us that in Australia no treaty was ever made or signed, there was no negotiation or acknowledgement that First Nations people were already living here.
So many good things to discuss like context, the use of Indigenous names on land that wasn’t ever purchased in a legal way. I could go on but I won’t, you can tell I loved the book. Please read it and tell me what you think. Another book that could be a text in high schools.
November 14, 2025
More of a 3.5. The work Grenville is doing here is so important, and yet by its nature limited, almost hyper individual. Reading Unsettled is not doing the work for yourself; it's reading someone else's account of doing their own work. Not only that, but the work is ongoing, so there is no real conclusion to be had from a book like this. It's personally, if not historically, rigorous, but it's also meandering and in many ways unsatisfying. At the same time, it puts this kind of profound reckoning onto the shelves of many Aussies who, I imagine, might never think about it otherwise. It's accessible, it's earnest, it's honest. I can't think of a single balanda I wouldn't recommend it to.
July 4, 2025
This is a substantial book and I have to admit I read it carefully at the start and finish, more lightly in between. It’s a travel book in that the author follows the actual roads and places that her ancestors went on from 1830 on. So it’s descriptive too. More importantly to the writer and reader, it’s powerfully reflective about the relationship between the original inhabitants of the land and the people who came and take it. Her forebears are one side of the triangle , the original inhabitants another, with the physical land making up the story . It’s a lot to take in. I’ll be dipping in to read more.
October 23, 2025
Grateful for all the content re the hard and important truths about our history and the ongoing violence that occurs through our use of language and whitewashing. Found the musings about what the author’s forebears and others might’ve been thinking just irritating, and several times considered giving up. Happy to move on, but will take some powerful lessons with me.
July 1, 2025
I enjoyed this work although the author appeared to ramble in her journey of discovery that took me to familiar and unfamiliar places close to my home.
This work was satisfying as it added more context to Grenville's earlier stories about her family and forebears that I had read.
Most importantly it made me think and reflect on Australian history and forced me ponder on any interactions that may have occurred between my white and indigenous ancestors.
This work was satisfying as it added more context to Grenville's earlier stories about her family and forebears that I had read.
Most importantly it made me think and reflect on Australian history and forced me ponder on any interactions that may have occurred between my white and indigenous ancestors.
August 17, 2025
https://denisenewtonwrites.com/?p=7118
I had been waiting for this book, from the moment I first heard about it.
Kate Grenville’s earlier work, The Secret River (published 2005) has become something of an Australian classic. It’s fictionalised account of her ancestor Solomon Wiseman’s life as a convict, then a wealthy settler on the Hawkesbury River sparked discussion of the realities of the interface between white and black histories of this country.
Since then she has written several other works of historical fiction, and some non-fiction, inspired by or about the lives of her ancestors and their times.
Now she has turned her sharp analysis to the question of ‘What does it mean to be on land that was taken from other people? Now that we know how the taking was done, what do we do with that knowledge?’
Subtitled ‘A journey through time and place’, Unsettled is her account of a pilgrimage of sorts, in which she travels through the places of significance in her family stories, passed on to her by her mother. She is searching for the hidden side of those stories, the people deliberately or carelessly written out of history: the First Peoples with whom her ancestors would have interacted.
In my research and writing about my own family history I have struggled with these questions and the silences of the past. What part did my ancestors play in the dispossession of the First Nations of this land? Were they perpetrators of any of the many acts of violence towards Aboriginal people that took place in colonial and later times? How would I feel if I discovered evidence of this? What would I do with that knowledge?
Like Ms Grenville, I came to the conclusion that all of my ancestors were, in some capacity, complicit in the long act of dispossession since 1788. Many (like the convicts sent here on the transport ships from England and Ireland) unwillingly so. Others (like Grenville, I have ancestors who ‘took up’ land as squatters, benefiting enormously from what was essentially a free-for-all land grab in the early years of white settlement) did so very willingly indeed. Later generations lived (as I do today) in country that was stolen, unceded land.
It is a difficult truth to stare in the face and one that, for generations, white Australians preferred not to see.
Hence the weasel words used to describe the acts of stealing land and the people who stole it (taking up land, opening it up, squatting, land grants, settlers, pioneers, explorers) and ones that were used about the people from whom the land was stolen (blacks, savages, nomads, going walkabout, as examples.) The latter demonstrated a supreme lack of understanding of the subtle and sophisticated worldview and culture of the First Peoples, while the former justified the wholesale robbery of the land and all it contained by the invading colonists.
This book is all about seeing things differently:
Now that I think about it. That’s the thing – I’m thinking about things differently now, rather than sliding along on the well-lubricated surface of unremarkable words. Thinking in a way that allows a whole other story to be glimpsed. No, not even a story, just a suggestion of a suspicion, embedded so far below the surface it’s easy to pooh-pooh it as ridiculous.
Unsettled p35
This is a very personal journey and a very personal story. But Grenville’s skill as a storyteller weaves a tale that is both individual and general to all Australians. While imparting her unique responses to the places she visits, the experiences she has on her travels and what she finds in her research, the questions she poses are for us all to consider.
Her comments about the popularity of family history resonate with me, and I think are meaningful on a bigger scale as well:
we…need to be asking questions about our forebears. Not to reassure ourselves, and not to make any claims for ourselves, but to learn how we really fit – and the ways we don’t fit – into the story of being here.
Unsettled p206
I could not agree more.
Here is Kate Grenville discussing the impulse that set her on the journey of exploration that resulted in Unsettled.
Unsettled was published by Black Inc Books in 2025
I had been waiting for this book, from the moment I first heard about it.
Kate Grenville’s earlier work, The Secret River (published 2005) has become something of an Australian classic. It’s fictionalised account of her ancestor Solomon Wiseman’s life as a convict, then a wealthy settler on the Hawkesbury River sparked discussion of the realities of the interface between white and black histories of this country.
Since then she has written several other works of historical fiction, and some non-fiction, inspired by or about the lives of her ancestors and their times.
Now she has turned her sharp analysis to the question of ‘What does it mean to be on land that was taken from other people? Now that we know how the taking was done, what do we do with that knowledge?’
Subtitled ‘A journey through time and place’, Unsettled is her account of a pilgrimage of sorts, in which she travels through the places of significance in her family stories, passed on to her by her mother. She is searching for the hidden side of those stories, the people deliberately or carelessly written out of history: the First Peoples with whom her ancestors would have interacted.
In my research and writing about my own family history I have struggled with these questions and the silences of the past. What part did my ancestors play in the dispossession of the First Nations of this land? Were they perpetrators of any of the many acts of violence towards Aboriginal people that took place in colonial and later times? How would I feel if I discovered evidence of this? What would I do with that knowledge?
Like Ms Grenville, I came to the conclusion that all of my ancestors were, in some capacity, complicit in the long act of dispossession since 1788. Many (like the convicts sent here on the transport ships from England and Ireland) unwillingly so. Others (like Grenville, I have ancestors who ‘took up’ land as squatters, benefiting enormously from what was essentially a free-for-all land grab in the early years of white settlement) did so very willingly indeed. Later generations lived (as I do today) in country that was stolen, unceded land.
It is a difficult truth to stare in the face and one that, for generations, white Australians preferred not to see.
Hence the weasel words used to describe the acts of stealing land and the people who stole it (taking up land, opening it up, squatting, land grants, settlers, pioneers, explorers) and ones that were used about the people from whom the land was stolen (blacks, savages, nomads, going walkabout, as examples.) The latter demonstrated a supreme lack of understanding of the subtle and sophisticated worldview and culture of the First Peoples, while the former justified the wholesale robbery of the land and all it contained by the invading colonists.
This book is all about seeing things differently:
Now that I think about it. That’s the thing – I’m thinking about things differently now, rather than sliding along on the well-lubricated surface of unremarkable words. Thinking in a way that allows a whole other story to be glimpsed. No, not even a story, just a suggestion of a suspicion, embedded so far below the surface it’s easy to pooh-pooh it as ridiculous.
Unsettled p35
This is a very personal journey and a very personal story. But Grenville’s skill as a storyteller weaves a tale that is both individual and general to all Australians. While imparting her unique responses to the places she visits, the experiences she has on her travels and what she finds in her research, the questions she poses are for us all to consider.
Her comments about the popularity of family history resonate with me, and I think are meaningful on a bigger scale as well:
we…need to be asking questions about our forebears. Not to reassure ourselves, and not to make any claims for ourselves, but to learn how we really fit – and the ways we don’t fit – into the story of being here.
Unsettled p206
I could not agree more.
Here is Kate Grenville discussing the impulse that set her on the journey of exploration that resulted in Unsettled.
Unsettled was published by Black Inc Books in 2025
June 8, 2025
“We can’t undo history, but we can’t ignore it either. What do we do, now that we know?”
Unsettled is the seventh non-fiction book by award-winning, best-selling Australian author, Kate Grenville. The audio is narrated by the author. After writing novels loosely based on her ancestors, Grenville uneasily acknowledges that, with regard to the land stolen from Australia’s First Nations people, her own forebears were, in all probability, part of the problem. She sets off on what she sees as a pilgrimage, a very personal journey, visiting those places mentioned in the handed-down family history, an attempt to look with new eyes.
At each place, she explains the significance to her family’s history, and approaches the episode with open-minded musing about what might really have occurred, when mentions of Aborigines are often glaringly absent in historical accounts.
She regularly checks her own attitude, trying to discern if she is taking the easy path to avoid feeling uncomfortable about those realisations. When she finds herself reassured by the fact that an ancestor owned a pub rather than being a land-thieving squatter, she digs deeper to discover the truth about him, when it has always been easier to look away. More than once she questions what she has been accepting as a well-meaning white person.
Grenville takes a critical look at accepted terminology, analysing the euphemisms and sanitised language used in historical documents (“took up land” sounds much less like stealing it than “took land”) and still today on official signs at historical sites, noting what is omitted and where the language is vague and passive. She also considers the way people name places and properties, often ill-considered appropriations.
She explains exactly how, through the insidious process of Crown possession, grants and leases, the land was “legally” stolen without any treaty ever being made with the First Nations people, who were wrongly classified as nomadic. And with never any consideration of the fact that this land was “already the home – and spiritual identity – of other people.”
She identifies a complicated feeling that happens “when you’ve benefitted from a great wrong but you weren’t the one who actually did it. What we should feel guilt for may not be the stealing itself, but the fact that we keep on refusing to address what the stealing has done.”
She gives the reader some gorgeous descriptive prose: “I pull over and get out, the quiet pouring in like smooth liquid as I stand on the dust of the road. The afternoon sun slants softly, filling the grass with a cloud of radiance. There’s a world of sound here. There’s the whispering of the trees, the quick twittering of birds, the long, sad cry of a crow,, and that almost-too-high-pitched-to-hear insect thrum that you get in the bush once you’re not crashing through it… Standing in the heart of this folded land is like being within a vast living creature, its existence progressing at a slow scale that makes human life a flicker of nothing”, although this definitely doesn’t apply to one significant spot: the carpark of Tamworth’s K-Mart.
Included are several maps of her journey and a handy family tree, all held within some striking cover art by Alex Ross. This candid account is thought provoking, insightful, and important, and should be compulsory reading for every Australian.
Unsettled is the seventh non-fiction book by award-winning, best-selling Australian author, Kate Grenville. The audio is narrated by the author. After writing novels loosely based on her ancestors, Grenville uneasily acknowledges that, with regard to the land stolen from Australia’s First Nations people, her own forebears were, in all probability, part of the problem. She sets off on what she sees as a pilgrimage, a very personal journey, visiting those places mentioned in the handed-down family history, an attempt to look with new eyes.
At each place, she explains the significance to her family’s history, and approaches the episode with open-minded musing about what might really have occurred, when mentions of Aborigines are often glaringly absent in historical accounts.
She regularly checks her own attitude, trying to discern if she is taking the easy path to avoid feeling uncomfortable about those realisations. When she finds herself reassured by the fact that an ancestor owned a pub rather than being a land-thieving squatter, she digs deeper to discover the truth about him, when it has always been easier to look away. More than once she questions what she has been accepting as a well-meaning white person.
Grenville takes a critical look at accepted terminology, analysing the euphemisms and sanitised language used in historical documents (“took up land” sounds much less like stealing it than “took land”) and still today on official signs at historical sites, noting what is omitted and where the language is vague and passive. She also considers the way people name places and properties, often ill-considered appropriations.
She explains exactly how, through the insidious process of Crown possession, grants and leases, the land was “legally” stolen without any treaty ever being made with the First Nations people, who were wrongly classified as nomadic. And with never any consideration of the fact that this land was “already the home – and spiritual identity – of other people.”
She identifies a complicated feeling that happens “when you’ve benefitted from a great wrong but you weren’t the one who actually did it. What we should feel guilt for may not be the stealing itself, but the fact that we keep on refusing to address what the stealing has done.”
She gives the reader some gorgeous descriptive prose: “I pull over and get out, the quiet pouring in like smooth liquid as I stand on the dust of the road. The afternoon sun slants softly, filling the grass with a cloud of radiance. There’s a world of sound here. There’s the whispering of the trees, the quick twittering of birds, the long, sad cry of a crow,, and that almost-too-high-pitched-to-hear insect thrum that you get in the bush once you’re not crashing through it… Standing in the heart of this folded land is like being within a vast living creature, its existence progressing at a slow scale that makes human life a flicker of nothing”, although this definitely doesn’t apply to one significant spot: the carpark of Tamworth’s K-Mart.
Included are several maps of her journey and a handy family tree, all held within some striking cover art by Alex Ross. This candid account is thought provoking, insightful, and important, and should be compulsory reading for every Australian.
June 3, 2025
A cranky road trip to reconciliation
Kate Grenville's latest book documents her gutsy journey 'up country' into northern inland New South Wales, serving up excellent fodder for city slickers intent on reading about reconciliation between First Nations and settler Australians.
As she ruminates on colonial blindspots at country town memorials, pubs, farm gates and creeks, Grenville delivers her signature inner dialogue, heartfelt and tense; but as the discoveries about her ancestors mount up, she gets increasingly tetchy and judges the current locals at every step.
I found myself wincing at her portrayal of some who would be easily identifiable to residents of various towns. These scenes are replete with assumptions that require journalistic triangulation to achieve any objectivity, and the solution was always just a few interviews away.
Yet the author often describes accelerating away from encounters she finds fearful, such as a farmer wondering why she's parked on his driveway. It makes the author's road trip less about discovery (heck, he might have just been wondering if Grenville had a flat tyre) and more of a drive-by trolling, like the Greens bussing to Queensland's mining heartland from Melbourne expecting to bring ideologies together.
The old saying about catching more flies with honey instead of vinegar applies, particularly in the country. Dialogue would have led the author to places where reconciliation grows beyond the libraries and the cenotaphs, driven by passionate people making a difference at the coalface. Instead, this book stands to alienate many in the regions Grenville travelled through.
Where Unsettled achieves for metro readers is its roadmap, literal and emotional. Still, I'm baffled about who Grenville hopes to inspire as she exhorts the reader to take up the necessary process of looking back, particularly at our forbears and finding out what they did. This is where the lasting message of this book (that when you know about something, you know) hits a roadblock, because who wants to replicate such a lonely rural getaway, chasing ghosts who very likely did bad things?
I do, and I recognise a lot of myself in Grenville, because I often haunt the landscapes of my ancestors. They are my heartlands, and they certainly saw Frontier War crimes. The driveway to the property where my parents farmed in the 1970s marks the eastern boundary of the Myall Creek district, site of the 1838 massacre of Indigenous people, infamous because some of its white perpetrators were tried and hanged.
My family didn't settle there until long after the Gamilaroi people had been almost dispossessed of their country. We were among the many generations to benefit from the clearances, yet the crime and my knowledge of it since childhood has always been the source of my reconciliation actions.
Sometimes my efforts are public, such as campaigning for the Yes vote in the 2023 Voice Referendum. Sometimes they are private, but certainly they would have been invisible to Grenville on her quick turnaround in my region.
What I was expecting her to do in Unsettled is that thing most journalists dread: a death knock. This requires door-stopping people, raising awkward questions with those who likely don't want to talk, yet listening without judgement.
Rural journos also know there is no point stopping halfway up any driveway. A few words leaning on a farm gate while you declare your intentions, or over a cuppa and a scone at the kitchen table, have the potential to bridge pretty big divides.
The death knocks for Myall Creek have been done across three centuries, predominantly by locals for locals. All that is left is for more Australians to listen, and had Grenville attended the annual Myall Creek Memorial weekend in June, instead of her solo walk at the site, her book would have undoubtedly been informed by this vibrant, living reconciliation action now in its 25th year. The sight of so many New Englanders showing up at the ceremony and simply listening is a quiet balm that must be experienced in person.
It should, by now, be inspiring more such rural events nationally. Instead, a growing city/country divide in this country sees more and more outsiders baffled by places like the New England, and Unsettled does little to build bridges.
Grenville deserves credit for attempting to see the colonised landscape for what it is and pushing against the lies within the language rural Australian in particular has used since the Frontier Wars. Her acts of quietly and privately thinking her way through the pervasive de-humanising that was wrought in Australia are extremely powerful, and in many ways justify the lonely nature of the trip.
She absolutely nails her strongest argument when she observes the jingoistic habit of professing love for a stolen country, and how the depth of that ardour can never erase the fact that it was stolen. In my travels, I see just as many signs of that in city suburbs as I do in the bush.
Unsettled is one of many journeys the author has taken following the trails of her ancestors, and her explorer's observations are deeply meaningful to her. Whether Grenville unearthed any larger truths – the note that she reaches for at the end – is on the rest of us.
It takes more than one person visiting a place to settle anything about it.
Kate Grenville's latest book documents her gutsy journey 'up country' into northern inland New South Wales, serving up excellent fodder for city slickers intent on reading about reconciliation between First Nations and settler Australians.
As she ruminates on colonial blindspots at country town memorials, pubs, farm gates and creeks, Grenville delivers her signature inner dialogue, heartfelt and tense; but as the discoveries about her ancestors mount up, she gets increasingly tetchy and judges the current locals at every step.
I found myself wincing at her portrayal of some who would be easily identifiable to residents of various towns. These scenes are replete with assumptions that require journalistic triangulation to achieve any objectivity, and the solution was always just a few interviews away.
Yet the author often describes accelerating away from encounters she finds fearful, such as a farmer wondering why she's parked on his driveway. It makes the author's road trip less about discovery (heck, he might have just been wondering if Grenville had a flat tyre) and more of a drive-by trolling, like the Greens bussing to Queensland's mining heartland from Melbourne expecting to bring ideologies together.
The old saying about catching more flies with honey instead of vinegar applies, particularly in the country. Dialogue would have led the author to places where reconciliation grows beyond the libraries and the cenotaphs, driven by passionate people making a difference at the coalface. Instead, this book stands to alienate many in the regions Grenville travelled through.
Where Unsettled achieves for metro readers is its roadmap, literal and emotional. Still, I'm baffled about who Grenville hopes to inspire as she exhorts the reader to take up the necessary process of looking back, particularly at our forbears and finding out what they did. This is where the lasting message of this book (that when you know about something, you know) hits a roadblock, because who wants to replicate such a lonely rural getaway, chasing ghosts who very likely did bad things?
I do, and I recognise a lot of myself in Grenville, because I often haunt the landscapes of my ancestors. They are my heartlands, and they certainly saw Frontier War crimes. The driveway to the property where my parents farmed in the 1970s marks the eastern boundary of the Myall Creek district, site of the 1838 massacre of Indigenous people, infamous because some of its white perpetrators were tried and hanged.
My family didn't settle there until long after the Gamilaroi people had been almost dispossessed of their country. We were among the many generations to benefit from the clearances, yet the crime and my knowledge of it since childhood has always been the source of my reconciliation actions.
Sometimes my efforts are public, such as campaigning for the Yes vote in the 2023 Voice Referendum. Sometimes they are private, but certainly they would have been invisible to Grenville on her quick turnaround in my region.
What I was expecting her to do in Unsettled is that thing most journalists dread: a death knock. This requires door-stopping people, raising awkward questions with those who likely don't want to talk, yet listening without judgement.
Rural journos also know there is no point stopping halfway up any driveway. A few words leaning on a farm gate while you declare your intentions, or over a cuppa and a scone at the kitchen table, have the potential to bridge pretty big divides.
The death knocks for Myall Creek have been done across three centuries, predominantly by locals for locals. All that is left is for more Australians to listen, and had Grenville attended the annual Myall Creek Memorial weekend in June, instead of her solo walk at the site, her book would have undoubtedly been informed by this vibrant, living reconciliation action now in its 25th year. The sight of so many New Englanders showing up at the ceremony and simply listening is a quiet balm that must be experienced in person.
It should, by now, be inspiring more such rural events nationally. Instead, a growing city/country divide in this country sees more and more outsiders baffled by places like the New England, and Unsettled does little to build bridges.
Grenville deserves credit for attempting to see the colonised landscape for what it is and pushing against the lies within the language rural Australian in particular has used since the Frontier Wars. Her acts of quietly and privately thinking her way through the pervasive de-humanising that was wrought in Australia are extremely powerful, and in many ways justify the lonely nature of the trip.
She absolutely nails her strongest argument when she observes the jingoistic habit of professing love for a stolen country, and how the depth of that ardour can never erase the fact that it was stolen. In my travels, I see just as many signs of that in city suburbs as I do in the bush.
Unsettled is one of many journeys the author has taken following the trails of her ancestors, and her explorer's observations are deeply meaningful to her. Whether Grenville unearthed any larger truths – the note that she reaches for at the end – is on the rest of us.
It takes more than one person visiting a place to settle anything about it.
August 9, 2025
Grenville takes her grandmother Maunder story further back, forward an d around. Her grt grt great grandfather Solomon Wiseman and “took up” land at Wiseman’s Ferry, starting the ferry there. And developing land, which belonged to First Nations people That story is elaborated in The Secret River. The Wiseman boys moved North through St Albans to Murrurundi. A son John Martin Davis moves north to Currabubula and “takes up” lots of land thereabouts. She traces other ancestors including Dolly through Tamworth to Guubnedha and Guyra with a chapter on the Myall Creek massacre and how it was handled judicially.. The last reveals the real theme: displacement of First Nations peoples with all sorts of cover ups, euphemisms, from the incorrect aboriginal have no sense of land belongingness, they are nomads you see. They are not. Grenville undoes all those self-serving myths, deconstructing word by word phrase by phrase, perhaps overdoing it. She italicizes the offending words that cover for the past. She explores the ground and surrounds carefully and finds evidence that the aboriginals certainly did have a strong impact on the environment, preserving water, allowing for regrowth but in unobtrusive ways that the settlers didn’t recognise and completely destroyed by clearing trees, fencing and grazing cattle and especially sheep who destroyed the soil layers. The parallel “like an Irishman with his potatoes” on the other hand shows a degree olf parallelism between settlers’ and aboriginal farming, the difference being that the latter were aware of rehabilitation and balance. The settlers went for immediate returns and bugger the long term, in true capitalist style. The question of guilt by present day “ballandas” (a very useful term for non-aboriginal Australians, coming from Macassar a corruption of Hollanders) is handled very well, but somewhat hampered by the “No” vote.
May 22, 2025
This book is a great starting point for anyone starting to pay more attention to their place in Australia as a descendant of immigrants/settlers or immigrants themselves.
It should be read along with novels and non-fiction by First Nations Australians to ensure you’re getting a more in-depth and broader view of the truth.
I found the questioning of language and names particularly interesting, if only conjecture, it still served to provoke you to think a little deeper when you see place names.
She’s very clear that this is a book for non-indigenous Australians. At times I found myself wanting real answers and would have to remind myself that’s the whole point - there aren’t straightforward answers or clear records of what happened in so many cases. Where knowledge and stories have passed down among Aboriginal people, it’s not our business. We can’t demand they give up stories about information because just like their land, we don’t have a right to it. So we are left to puzzle it out and sit in that uncomfortable feeling of not knowing. Not knowing the sacred cultural stories and sites of the land we grew up on. Not knowing whether our not our specific ancestors did something deplorable. Not knowing what to do, now that we know.
To that last point though - we can try. We are all in this mess together whether we like it or not, so we have to find a way to walk forward together, side by side.
It should be read along with novels and non-fiction by First Nations Australians to ensure you’re getting a more in-depth and broader view of the truth.
I found the questioning of language and names particularly interesting, if only conjecture, it still served to provoke you to think a little deeper when you see place names.
She’s very clear that this is a book for non-indigenous Australians. At times I found myself wanting real answers and would have to remind myself that’s the whole point - there aren’t straightforward answers or clear records of what happened in so many cases. Where knowledge and stories have passed down among Aboriginal people, it’s not our business. We can’t demand they give up stories about information because just like their land, we don’t have a right to it. So we are left to puzzle it out and sit in that uncomfortable feeling of not knowing. Not knowing the sacred cultural stories and sites of the land we grew up on. Not knowing whether our not our specific ancestors did something deplorable. Not knowing what to do, now that we know.
To that last point though - we can try. We are all in this mess together whether we like it or not, so we have to find a way to walk forward together, side by side.
April 11, 2025
Having respected Grenville’s known responses to Australia’s failure to come to terms with its past, I was absorbed by her writing about her own family’s colonial history. The Secret River was based on her convict ancestry, which she thoroughly explored in her latest work, a non-fiction account of the generations of her family who were connected to the “sharp edge of the moving blade that was colonisation.” (back cover). Her searching for answers as to her own family’s involvement centres around the probing question of “What do we do with the fact that we’re the beneficiaries of a violent past? If we acknowledge that we’re on land that was taken from other people, what do we do about that?” This work focuses on what transpired, what can no longer be ignored as the author travels through the country her ancestors settled, the country that was “stolen” by them from the original owners, the Aboriginal population that had lived on the land for thousands of years.
I was glued to her recounting the history of white settlement and the degradations suffered by the Aboriginal people, her journey “through time and place”, as she drove through the locations of her family’s stories in search of answers that were painful, but necessary to hear. Hers was a brave and inspired mission, understanding that “{W}e can’t undo history, but we can’t ignore it either.”
I was glued to her recounting the history of white settlement and the degradations suffered by the Aboriginal people, her journey “through time and place”, as she drove through the locations of her family’s stories in search of answers that were painful, but necessary to hear. Hers was a brave and inspired mission, understanding that “{W}e can’t undo history, but we can’t ignore it either.”
June 3, 2025
At least when Tom Keneally published “A Bloody Good Rant” in 2021, he was honest with the title. Perhaps Grenville feels she has been with this but in truth, it’s just 250 odd pages of a rant bought on by Australians failing to take the next step forward in reconciling with its First Peoples by changing its Constitution.
Masquerading as family history, the author takes all to task who are not indigenous, excoriating her ancestors with little or no evidence other than the fact they were there. Retelling that history almost exclusively by anecdote, she uses times and places as the scaffold in which to construct her case against them and then generously applies blame and shame to everyone since.
It has long since been clear that reconciliation will stall while parties stand and point fingers but truth telling is not about allocating blame. It’s about honesty in history, acceptance and recognition of harm - for want of a better word - and a commitment to not just a better future but one where equity is the standard not the goal.
This book will do nothing to aid that process.
Masquerading as family history, the author takes all to task who are not indigenous, excoriating her ancestors with little or no evidence other than the fact they were there. Retelling that history almost exclusively by anecdote, she uses times and places as the scaffold in which to construct her case against them and then generously applies blame and shame to everyone since.
It has long since been clear that reconciliation will stall while parties stand and point fingers but truth telling is not about allocating blame. It’s about honesty in history, acceptance and recognition of harm - for want of a better word - and a commitment to not just a better future but one where equity is the standard not the goal.
This book will do nothing to aid that process.
July 24, 2025
Once again, I picked up a book from the “hot list” at my library assuming it was fiction—only to discover it was a memoir. A pleasant surprise, and a deeply relatable one at that.
Although I am not a white Australian like the author, I found much of what Grenville expressed resonated with me. She gave language to feelings I’ve carried for years but never quite knew how to articulate. As Australians, we grow up learning a version of our history that is both heavily taught and heavily edited. There’s a strange tension between what we’re told and what is left unsaid, and I still find myself grappling with what to do with the knowledge I now have. What action is appropriate—if any?…
While the book doesn’t dig as deep as it could, I also appreciated that it didn’t feel preachy. Grenville communicates a lot without spelling everything out, which I found refreshing. Perhaps if I hadn’t lived in Australia all my life, I might have read it differently. But as it stands, I found this a compelling and thought-provoking read that left a lasting impression.
Although I am not a white Australian like the author, I found much of what Grenville expressed resonated with me. She gave language to feelings I’ve carried for years but never quite knew how to articulate. As Australians, we grow up learning a version of our history that is both heavily taught and heavily edited. There’s a strange tension between what we’re told and what is left unsaid, and I still find myself grappling with what to do with the knowledge I now have. What action is appropriate—if any?…
While the book doesn’t dig as deep as it could, I also appreciated that it didn’t feel preachy. Grenville communicates a lot without spelling everything out, which I found refreshing. Perhaps if I hadn’t lived in Australia all my life, I might have read it differently. But as it stands, I found this a compelling and thought-provoking read that left a lasting impression.
April 30, 2025
Kate Grenville’s Unsettled left a mark on me that I’m still processing. I read it during a road trip, and the stark beauty of the landscape around me only deepened the ache this story created. It scarred my soul in the best kind of way—by opening my heart to truths that are hard to face, but essential to hold.
Grenville weaves fiction with deep historical resonance, illuminating the violence, dispossession, and human cost of colonisation in a way that feels both intimate and immense. Her writing doesn’t lecture; it invites reflection. It made me so heart sore—aware of the painful legacy that continues to shape our country, and the lost possibilities of what might have been if things had unfolded differently.
Unsettled isn’t a comfortable read, but it is an important one. It left me grieving, but also more conscious, more awake. I’ll be thinking about it for a long time—and I hope others do too.
Grenville weaves fiction with deep historical resonance, illuminating the violence, dispossession, and human cost of colonisation in a way that feels both intimate and immense. Her writing doesn’t lecture; it invites reflection. It made me so heart sore—aware of the painful legacy that continues to shape our country, and the lost possibilities of what might have been if things had unfolded differently.
Unsettled isn’t a comfortable read, but it is an important one. It left me grieving, but also more conscious, more awake. I’ll be thinking about it for a long time—and I hope others do too.
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June 1, 2025kate is aware of her positionality and white privilege but is it enough? I don't think so and I'm struggling to form a solid opinion. on the one hand, kate does not shy away from comfortable and uncomfortable truths but I do think her fiction writing like The Secret River was a better approach. it's not that authors shouldn't delve into their family history or share their insights but kate is easily able to get published as a renowned white author. you cannot ignore that while reading.
the structure also felt very meandering (which is acknowledged) but still there were important reflections, especially into how one grows up in Australia and navigating being a beneficiary on stolen land. I am concerned about the repetitive use of "there was violence on both sides...." (another phrase would usually follow and it was elaborated upon) but I don't think you should bring up "both sides" when it comes to colonisation, point blank.
the structure also felt very meandering (which is acknowledged) but still there were important reflections, especially into how one grows up in Australia and navigating being a beneficiary on stolen land. I am concerned about the repetitive use of "there was violence on both sides...." (another phrase would usually follow and it was elaborated upon) but I don't think you should bring up "both sides" when it comes to colonisation, point blank.
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