Australian Utopia in Kate Grenville’s The Secret River

Abstract

Kate Grenville’s The Secret River (2005) depicts the early settlement of Australia by convicts from Britain, and the torments experienced by both settlers and Aboriginals. Thomas More’s Utopia also proposes setting up colonies on its mainland as a natural right if the utopian land becomes overpopulated. The Secret River, and like Utopia, responds to the overarching causes of injustice and inequalities in England at the time. Both texts react to specific local issues of wealth, poverty, convicts, power and landownership. This paper attempts to analyze The Secret River by applying the same narrative dynamics of More’s Utopia. The standpoint of this paper is that the practice of resettling convicts is similar to More’s proposal in Utopia and is initiated to solve contemporary crises in English society and as a vision for a better society. However, and unlike Utopia, Australia becomes a utopia for settlers and a dystopia for the natives due to private property and the destruction of communal life and not the settlement of convicts.