ABSTRACT
In this chapter we consider the role of the novelist as revisionist historian and the potential for literature to grapple with the half-known or imagined actions of ancestors at settlement. Grenville and Flanagan, two of Australia’s most popular literary authors, have both written novels that reframe and ground the History Wars, a controversial public debate about Australia’s colonial foundations. Drawing from the novelists’ own family histories, Death of a River Guide (Flanagan 1994) and The Secret River (Grenville 2005b) both dramatise different aspects of frontier conflict and attempt to deal with the troubled and sometimes obscured origins of the family. The figure of the convict, a stain on the family name, is hidden in the past; so too are their relations with the traditional owners of the land. Both novels devise modes to reckon with the actions of our ancestors. In this opening chapter, we will closely analyse the novels within the context of high-profile public debates about the ethics of writing fiction as historiography.
