Kate Grenville on colonist John Macarthur: 'It'd be nice to see some of those statues toppled'
Kate Grenville may have featured the corrupt early colonist John Macarthur in her new work of Australian historical fiction, A Room Made of Leaves, but that doesn’t mean the author believes he should be celebrated.
In a wide-ranging conversation about history, fact and fiction for Guardian Australia’s third monthly online book club – a Melbourne writers’ festival event that was hosted on Zoom – Grenville in fact agreed that Macarthur was “a royal shit”.
The author of The Secret River was echoing a turn of phrase introduced by her interviewer Michael Williams to describe the wool industry pioneer. “But what I’ve tried to do in the book is something more interesting than just describe him as a royal shit … Shitty people are made, not born,” she said. “So I have tried to make him a fairly rounded, interesting, unhappy but sympathy-worthy character.
“I suppose there are statues of him. It would be nice to see some of those statues toppled.”
A Room Made of Leaves is built around a fake premise: that the author has discovered an old tin box filled with the memoirs of Macarthur’s wife, Elizabeth. What follows is an invented account of the woman’s inner life, presented as the kind of dance between history and fiction for which Grenville has become known.
The book club conversation delved into questions of history, fiction, reconciliation with Indigenous Australia and the role the novelist might play in telling stories that dealt with difficult matter from the past and present. “Every writer has to come to their own place of comfort when writing about history, writing about people who are not themselves; the danger of appropriating and blundering into something you don’t know enough about,” Grenville said.
It’s been 10 years since her last published novel. A Room Made of Leaves – described in this publication as a “stunning literary achievement” – is Grenville’s ninth book, 20 years in the making; the idea sprung from the real letters of Elizabeth Macarthur, which Grenville first read while researching for her acclaimed 2005 novel, The Secret River.
“They are extremely boring and very bland [letters] but just once or twice there are some phrases where the real person blazes through,” Grenville said. “It gave me the idea that those bland and boring letters were just a mask, and the real Elizabeth Macarthur lived a much more interesting life.”
Women of the era had been almost completely obliterated from the public narrative, Grenville said. “They’re not just completely silenced, their true existence has been obscured.”
Grenville said she had always been fascinated by subjectivities and interrogating single narratives. “Maybe to make the opposition between fact and fiction, truth and imagination – maybe that’s the falsity,” she said. “Maybe that’s where this book really has its heart. Looking for those kind of simple oppositions is the problem.”
A Room Made of Leaves is a complex layering of fact and fiction, she said. “The book is like a set of nested Russian dolls but at the heart of it is fact – the real letters from Elizabeth Macarthur.”
Related: The Australian book you should read next: The Secret River by Kate Grenville
Her character, a colonist, eventually comes to realise that while the land she’s on is now her home, it is also stolen land. “She’s left with the questions that I think possibly we white Australians are left with today, which is: what do we do next?”
Grenville said A Room Made of Leaves was the book she was most satisfied with. “The whole idea of questioning stories has cracked open for me – I don’t know where I go next with this.
“I suspect this might be my last book,” she said, before revealing – in response to concerned questions from Williams and the nearly 1,000 audience members on Zoom and the Melbourne writers’ festival-hosted livestream – that she was working on another three projects.
She said her agent and publisher would attest to the fact she threatens to stop writing after every book.
“It hasn’t been true up till now but of course one of these days it will be,” she said. “It was a throwaway line but … I’m feeling a bit old, this whole Covid lockdown business does make a person [confront] their mortality.”
• Guardian Australia’s Book Club is a monthly event hosted on Zoom by Australia at Home. Stay tuned for our next announcement
