Inof on Joan Makes History

What we're after, of course, is stories, and we know that history is bulging with beauties. Having found them, we then proceed to fiddle with them to make them the way we want them to be, rather than the way they really were. We get it wrong, willfully and knowingly.

But perhaps you could say that the very flagrency of our "getting it wrong" points to the fact that all stories even the history "story" are made. They have an agenda, even if it's an unconscious one. Perhaps there are many ways to get it right.

The interesting parts of history are probably always what's not there. My own special area of interest about what's not in history is the women. As you would all know, by and large they're sadly absent from the historical record.

However, I'm lucky to be the recipient--custodian, even, if that doesn't sound too grandiose--of a rich oral history handed down from my mother, who got it from her mother and so on back down the line. She's told me family stories from every generation since our family first came to Australia--in the form of our wicked convict ancestor Solomon Wiseman, in 1806. Sol is supposed to have murdered his wife, and turned his daughter--pregnant to the riding-master--out of the house to starve. (But perhaps, the novelist in me thinks, she didn't starve , but went on to have, well, a story...) There was "Uncle Willie with the red hair" who was "killed [by falling] off a horse when he was eighteen and broke his mother's heart." There was her own mother, in love with a Catholic boy--a love as unthinkable as between a Montagu and a Capulet and was forced to marry a good Protestant boy. You should see the look on her face in the wedding photos.

This oral history, handed down in a series of formalised anecdotes from mother to daughter, leaving rich areas for speculation in between is, I suspect, one of the things that's made me a novelist.

http://www.nla.gov.au/events/history/papers/Kate_Grenville%20.html

SOUL-SEARCHING about our past is the new literary fashion. It is the period in which the breast-beaters, the moral Pharisees, are driven to tell us how, unlike their predecessors, they have political and moral virtue. The Aborigines, women and ordinary people have become the 'goodies', and all those who ignored them in their books or their teaching have become the 'baddies'. The winds of change are blowing over the ancient continent.

Some are still shouting into the wind. Some are keen to let us see they know the direction in which the wind is now blowing. Kate Grenville is not one of those writers who changes her mind as abruptly as the wind swings round during a blowsy Melbourne summer. She is a writer who knows about those things which belong to eternity, the things which are not affected by a change in the direction of the wind.

So when she sets out in this novel to tell us about the role of women in Australian history she does it in a most imaginative way. She tells two stories: the story of her fictitious Joan in the present, and the story of her other Joan, the woman who played a creative role at all the decisive moments of our history, from the time when James Cook first saw the east coast of New Holland almost down to the age of the pill and the computer and the word processor.

The first story begins with Joan's conception. On this, Kate Grenville is less whimsical than Laurence Sterne's Tristram Shandy, who wished that his parents had 'minded what they were about when they begot me'. Nor is she as magisteral in her melancholy as Alfred Housman in his austere couplet -- `The night my father got me/His mind was not on me.' Kate Grenville gives a no-nonsense account of Joan's conception. The 'deed of darkness' was performed in the bright light of the sun.

Joan's life is a pilgrimage not so much for the means of grace, as rather for a faith by which she can live. Kate Grenville takes the reader briskly, beautifully, through the early years. There is the discovery of the body and its hungers. There are the early fumbles with another girl. There is satisfaction of a kind with a man. But Joan wants more than the role of ministering to the delights of a hungry male. She does not want to be dominated. She wants freedom.

There are twists to the story. Nature has been slightly unkind. Joan does not have a pretty face. She is also a concealer. Nature has left her with a flat chest. Joan is too honest to 'fill out with cotton what God had forgotten'. She faces the truth about herself.

Joan finds her faith. Women are, she believes, the makers of history. 'Long after I am dirt', she writes in the autumn of her life, 'there will be such people screeching, singing and sneezing away, and I will always be a part of them... generations of women and men lived and died, and like them all I , Joan, have made history'. Recognition brings acceptance and resignation -- and an end of striving, but at least