The Secret River Quotes & Notes

Ownership Notes

- The English believed that by "marking" a piece of property with a crop they made it theirs.

- The natives, on the other hand, had free rein of the land for thousands of years before Australia was claimed for England.

- They saw the settlers as taking over land that had been theirs for centuries.

Ownership Quotes

- "There were no signs that the blacks felt the place belonged to them".

- "The thought of his place seemed to have allowed him to forget Smasher".

- "It was a piercing hunger in his guts: to own it".

- "To say mine in a way he had never been able to say mine of anything at all".

Clash of Cultures Notes

- Throughout the novel, Grenville juxtaposes British and Aboriginal understandings of several important social concepts: personal property, clothing, hunting and farming, family relationships, and relationship to the natural environment.

- The incomprehension with which each culture regards the other leads to the majority of conflicts in the novel.

- The British concepts of private property and settlement, backed up by the guns and might of the Empire, eventually win the battle between the two civilisations.

Clash of Cultures Quotes

- "He was the same as the ants or the flies, a hazard of the place that had to be dealt with".

- "The two streams of words rushed together like a sea meeting a river, pouring over each other hard and muddled".

- "The blacks were frequently committing their outrages and depredations".

- "They're savages, Dick. We're civilised folk, we don't go round naked".

- The Aboriginal singing "was not a tune, nothing cheerful that you might listen to like Oranges and Lemons".

- "To the man listening behind the tree, there was no more sense to the sound than there was to an insect's drone".

Social Hierarchy Notes

- The theme of social hierarchy and its levels of power runs throughout the novel.

- Beginning with William's first visit to Christ Church through to the placement of the stone lions on the gateposts of Thorhnhill's Point, Grenville explores the impact of social ranking on individual development.

- The humiliation that William experiences as a waterman in London marks his character for life and informs the choices he makes throughout the novel.

- He craves the thrill of wielding power over another person.

- For William and the other settlers (the majority of whom are convicts), their status as white men gives them permission to look down on other human beings (the Aborigines), for the first time in their lives.

- Their treatment of the Aborigines is informed by their understanding of how one should treat a racial and social inferior.

Social Hierarchy Quotes:

- "Her family was a notch up from the Thornhills".

- "The highest things were the steeples".

- Scabby Bill was "lower in the order of things even than they were".

Settlement was Unnatural & Should Not Have Happened Notes:

- The Europeans did not belong in Australia.

- They tried to distort the land and turn it into a new England, but the land could not be tamed.

- The Aboriginal people did belong in Australia; they had a connection to the land and they understood how to use it.

Settlement was Unnatural & Should Not Have Happened Quotes:

- "Forcing himself against the river".

- The forest "closed behind him as smoothly as a curtain".

- "The forest had never revealed dinner to Thornhill".

- The Aboriginal people "treated the place as if it was their own".