KATE Grenville's fictional work The Lieutenant provokes a major question.
Were there doubters among the early white settlers to Australia who did not agree with the British way of settling another people's country?
Perhaps it is Grenville merely recasting the scene and imbuing it with 21st century sentiments and regrets.
- The Lieutenant, by Kate Grenville. Text Publishing, rrp $45
The Lieutenant follows Grenville's earlier historical novel, The Secret River, which fictionalises the life of her convict ancestor and his days in the colony of New South Wales.
Like The Secret River, The Lieutenant also suggests that lack of understanding between two cultures fed fear and led to what we have today - a largely white Australia sorely wounded still by its fumbling 18th century beginnings when whites killed blacks and blacks killed whites.
The Lieutenant was inspired by the First Fleet notebooks of Williams Dawes, an astronomer.
Dawes' fictional character, Daniel Rooke, settles away from the main camp at Sydney Cove, all in the supposed name of having a clear view of the night sky. Here he discovers a kind of peace and freedom he hadn't previously known in class-ridden, duty-bound England.
Aborigines visit him and he befriends them.
But his peace is short-lived when duty calls him to join a hunting party.
Without giving away the story altogether it's enough to know that, in reality, the character upon which Rooke is based, William Dawes, was sent from the colony back to Britain. Dawes spent the rest of his life working to abolish slavery and died in Antigua, where he had established schools for former slaves, in 1836.
This easy-to-read book set this reader thinking about the attitudes of many of our earliest settlers towards Aborigines.
Grenville creates an opening for imagining what might have eventuated if only Australia was settled by men with Daniel Rooke's sensibilities. Or what might happen if only we could practise those sensibilities now.
