In 2023 Australians had the opportunity to vote in a referendum which would 'alter the Constitution to recognise the First Peoples of Australia by establishing an Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Voice.' The Voice would allow them Australia's First Nations people to make representations to Parliament on matters relating to them. It was a humble request but, without bipartisan support and clear campaign to dispel misinformation, the Voice referendum failed with only about 40% of Australians voting in favour. This was devastating for supporters of the Voice, pushing reconciliation back and deepening old wounds.
Grenville journeys from her home in Sydney to Wiseman's Ferry, where five generations ago Solomon Wiseman, the convict, merchant and ferryman set up a hotel, the Wiseman's Inn, when he gained his ticket of leave in 1810. She follows the path Wiseman's children would have taken north, as squatters, to settle on the land inhabited by the Dharug and Darkinjung people. During her pilgrimage north to Tamworth, she endeavours to stand on the land and understand what happened here so many years ago. As she says, she wants to see with new eyes.
Grenville challenges the way we spoke, and continue to speak, of our colonial past. Her forebears 'took up' the land according to the narratives passed down through family stories, as if the land was waiting for them. The 'up' in that phrase is added to avoid the notion that they took, as in stole, the land from those who were already there. Along the way she reads monuments that skirt around past tragedies and questions various terms like 'heritage'.
In Unsettled, Grenville asks 'what do we do with the fact that we are 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?' (p vii). She knows we cannot undo what happened in the past, but worries that we have closed our minds and sanitised what happened generations ago. She writes:
'Guilt is appropriate for one part of our legacy though. What we should feel guilt about may not be the stealing itself, but the fact that we keep on refusing to address what the stealing has done. We've resisted listening to First Nations people. We go on rejecting the ideas that they tell us will offer a way forward. We might tell ourselves that we don't need to feel guilty for the past. But we have to accept that we're guilty for what we're doing - or failing to do - in the present.' (p110)
Reading Unsettled is, well, unsettling. There are no answers, only more and more questions. Grenville wants us to lean in to the questions and not just take our ancestors' stories at face value. She wants us to love our country - its natural beauty, flora and fauna - and to understand our history. This is a book which calls for deep reflection.
Having read much of Grenville's previous works, like One Life: My Mother's Story (2015) and her recent novel Restless Dolly Maunder (2023), I am familiar with Grenville's family history and the places she travels to in Unsettled. As a descendent of convicts myself, my mother has pieced together our family's past from scraps of handed-down tales and documents detailing their transport, release, births, deaths and marriages. Like Grenville, she too has visited places our ancestors lived and dug deep to uncover our past and to fill in the gaps. Unsettled is a fascinating book for those of us who are open to shining a light in the darker parts of our own stories and to reevaluate what we have been told or not told, by those who came before us.