Portrait of Solomon Wiseman c. 1820–38, oil painting, reproduced with permission of the Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales. ‘Wiseman’s villa’ c. 1835, watercolour, S. H. Ervin Gallery Collection, reproduced with permission of the National Trust of Australia (NSW). Map by Tony Fankhauser

National Library of Australia
Cataloguing-in-Publication data:
Grenville, Kate, 1950–
Searching for the secret river / Kate Grenville.
ISBN: 9781921351860 (pbk.)
Grenville, Kate, 1950– —Secret river.
Wiseman, Solomon, 1778–1838.
Convicts—New South Wales—Biography.
Squatter settlements—New South Wales.
Wisemans Ferry (N.S.W.)—History.
994.402092

This project has been assisted by the Commonwealth Government, through the Australia Council, its arts funding and advisory body.

For Nance Isobel Russell,
1912–2002,
who gave me this journey

CONTENTS

PART ONE

1 Wiseman’s Ferry

2 Walking for Reconciliation

3 The Mitchell Library

4 Centenary of Federation

5 The Society of Genealogists

6 The Public Record Office

7 Three Cranes Wharf

8 Lightermen

9 The London Poor

10 Wiseman’s Life

11 Voices and Pictures

12 The Ghost Room

13 A Little Learning

14 The News of the Day

15 Historians

16 Aboriginal Voices

17 The Bush at Night

PART TWO

18 Starting to Write

19 The Assembly

20 The Fictional Quester

21 The Land Speaking

PART THREE

22 What Have I Got?

23 Finding the Characters

24 The Aboriginal Characters

25 Dialogue

26 The First Readers

27 Into the World

Acknowledgments

PART ONE

1
Wiseman’s Ferry

In the puritan Australia of my childhood, you could only get a drink on a Sunday if you were a ‘bona fide traveller’. That meant you had to have travelled fifty miles or more. Around Sydney a ring of townships at exactly the fifty-mile mark filled with cheerful people every Sunday. One of them was a little place called Wiseman’s Ferry.

It was called that because its cluster of houses and shops stood on the south bank of the Hawkesbury River, at a point too wide to be easily spanned by a bridge. For the last two hundred years, anyone wanting to cross had taken a ferry. The original ferryman was a man named Solomon Wiseman.

He was my great-great-great grandfather.

It was Mum’s idea to go and look at the place, one autumn day when I was about ten—it would have been around 1960— not because it was Sunday and she wanted a drink, but because of her feeling about family history. She’d heard a few stories about Solomon Wiseman from her mother, who’d got them from her mother, and so on back for five generations. Some families hand down christening mugs or silver teapots. We inherited stories.

She was proud of them: not of the stories themselves so much as the fact of having them. She enjoyed knowing the exact ways she was connected to the past along the family tree, and being able to tell a few anecdotes about some of those forebears.

All four generations had been rough country people—right up to her parents, who’d run a succession of pubs in country towns. There were several convicts in the family tree. She was proud of them. They’d shown a bit of spirit, she thought, in trying to get something for themselves and their families. They were survivors.