Extract from The Secret River by Kate Grenville.
The Secret River is set in Sydney during the earliest days of the British colonisation of Australia. The main character, William Thornhill, is an English convict who has arrived in Australia. He has recently earned his freedom and has just moved his wife and young sons to an isolated patch of land on the Hawkesbury River. Thornhill has heard from other settlers that Aboriginal Australians have been attacking British huts along the river.
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To be stretched out to sleep on his own earth, feeling his body lie along ground that was his – he felt he had been hurrying all his life, and had at last come to a place where he could stop. He could smell the rich damp air coming in the tent flap.
He could feel the shape of the ground through his back. “My own,” he kept saying to himself. “My place. Thornhill’s place.”
But the wind in the leaves up on the ridge was saying something else entirely.
***
A tent was all very well, but what marked a man’s claim was a rectangle of cleared and dug over dirt and something growing that had not been there before. He had corn seeds, a pick, an axe, a spade. It was a matter of choosing a patch of ground and opening it up to the sky.
One place was as good as another to heave the pick and let it bite into the ground. By the afternoon they had a tidy square dug over, ready for the seeds: no bigger than the tent, but enough to start with. It was not so much a crop3 he was aiming for, as a message. Like hoisting a flag on a pole.
In this notched land, where the unbroken forest covered the hills and dales like crumpled cloth, there was nothing a man could recognise as human, other than the small square of dirt they had dug. He could hear the blood pound in his ears, his breath coming in and out of his chest.
Then he saw that he was being watched by two black men. It was not so much that they appeared, as that they had chosen to become visible. They had made themselves comfortable. One had a foot wedged up against the side of a knee, balancing on his spear, so he was the echo of the angled branches around him. The other squatted as still as a boulder.
They held their spears as if absent-mindedly. He could not read their faces. Their eyes were hidden in the shadows cast by their heavy brows, their mouths large and unsmiling. They stood square on to him, fearlessly. The moment was theirs.
Thornhill wiped his hands down the side of his britches. He could feel his palms rub over the seam where the fabric was lumpy. It was a comfort. He did it again, then slid his hands into his pockets. It made him feel less helpless to have them tucked away where no one could see them. In some sideways part of his brain there was an image of getting into the pocket himself, in the warm and the dark, and curling up safe.
Up in a river-oak, a bird made a twittering as if amused, and a quick breeze sang through the leaves. At last he felt that there was nothing to be done but walk towards the men, speaking as to a couple of wary dogs. “Don’t spear me, there’s a good lad,” he said, addressing the younger one. “I’d give you a drink of tea only we ain’t got none.”
But the old man cut across his words as if they were of no more importance than the rattle of wind in a tree. He spoke at some length. It was not loud, just a flow of words like his skin, without clear edges. As he spoke he gestured with a fluid hand down the river, up and over the hills, did a flattening thing with this palm like smoothing a bedcover.
The meaningless words poured over Thornhill, and in the end they became maddening. He licked his lips and made himself speak. “You ain’t making no sense to me, mate,” he said. “Not a blinking word.” A thought made him laugh, and that made him bold. “You might as well bloody bark, mate,” he said, feeling his cheeks bunch up with the fun of it.
⦁ Translate the words in bold and any other words you do not know the meaning of below.
⦁ Identify ONE simile and ONE example of personification in the passage.
⦁ What is Thornhill’s attitude toward the land? Support your response with ONE example from the text.
⦁ How does the author convey the differences between the Aboriginal Australians and the British settlers in the text? Support your response with examples.
