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The Secret River

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“They’re not like us. They keep moving. They don’t dig down into a place. They just move across it. Put up a decent fence and they’ll get the idea.” – William Thornhill The Secret River, originally a novel by Kate Grenville, has been adapted into a play by Andrew Bovell, a Caucasian Australian author, which was published in 2013. The story consists of an English settler who is transported to New South Wales in 1806. After he earns his freedom, his family travel to Hawkesbury to live on 100 acres of land, only to discover that it is occupied by the Dharug people. The play challenges the audience to think about how everyone is able to take responsibility for Australia’s violent history by acknowledging the barbarous actions of the past. I believe …show more content…

Being a white Australian male, Bovell doesn’t have the right to express the horrifying and gory details of the massacre of Indigenous people and the events that played out before. The play revolves around the white settlers of Australia pilfering land from the Dharug people, almost paralleling how Bovell is interpreting the struggles of the Aboriginal people. The director of the play, Neil Armfield, has even spoken about how difficult is was to tell the story that “respectfully mourns the genocide that occurred across the land” and one that “celebrates the survival of Aboriginal culture against all forces.“ For years, Indigenous characters have been featured in texts by white Australian authors and often have been characterised in ways that make them very stereotypical. An example of this is Jasper Jones, a novel by Craig Silvey where an “half-caste” is accused of a murder. Aboriginal people being seen as savage and murderous is an archetypal view. In The Secret River, the white settlers have been shown like this when, for example, Smasher Sullivan brutally rapes and enslaves Indigenous women. Bovell has tried to create an equitable play that is progressive, but because of his ethnicity, it is difficult to accurately represent the Dharug

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