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. Thornhill visits him occasionally after the massacre, but never sees the woman or Blackwood's child again.The Secret River is rich and alive with metaphor: the coldness, hardness and immovability of stone and rock the dogs, everywhere dogs.

After the massacre, Thornhill’s second oldest son, Dick, goes to live with Blackwood and ferry rum up the river for him. He avoids them whenever possible and eventually attacks Smasher for speaking violently about the natives. Blackwood despises men like Smasher and Sagitty, who deal violently and cruelly with the natives. Thornhill also learns that Blackwood has an Aboriginal lover and the two have a child, and that Blackwood has learned the native language to communicate with them. Thornhill learns the extent of this when he goes to speak to Blackwood about the natives living on his own property and discovers that Blackwood lives on the very edge of his lagoon and doesn't venture into the forest because the natives told him to stay by the river. He tells Thornhill that when dealing with the Aborigines, he has to remember that nothing is free: if a person takes something, they must be willing to give a little in return.

Blackwood is a quiet and private man who speaks in riddles when he speaks at all. Thornhill runs into him later in New South Wales, where Blackwood is not only making his fortune honestly, he has also received a full pardon and owns land on the Hawkesbury River where he makes rum.

When Thornhill first meets Thomas Blackwood in London, he owns a lighter called the River Queen, which has a false bottom for stealing cargo.

The Secret River by Kate Grenville