"Labour Against Wilderness," Grenville's Story of Empathy

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    Jennifer Mae Hamilton’s “‘Labour against Wilderness’ and the Trouble with Property beyond The Secret River” discusses Thornhill’s obsession with property, his “labor against wilderness,” and the significance of this portrayal for how readers are meant to interpret it. She notes that Thornhill’s infatuation with property is born of his failure to hold anything of his own until reaching Australia, and how it is the driving force behind all of his motivations, and eventually the justification for murder and colonization as it “trumps the lives of Aboriginal people, who are problematically equated with birds: ‘They got no rights to any of this place. No more than a sparrow’ (Grenville 290)” (Hamilton 5).

    Eventually, despite finally claiming the property he has longed for his whole life, he should have felt triumphant, but realized too late that there may be something more at stake. While not fully accepting responsibility, the reader can tell that he is wracked with an unspeakable guilt while resorting to coping mechanisms that make things seem better than they are. Hamilton notes that The Secret River does not “[evade] colonial violence altogether or [demonize] white Australia,” but brings something new to the conversation by offering a detailed history of empathy, as the readers “are forced to witness and identify with frontier violence” (3). Hamilton finds that Thornhill is laboring against the uncertain boundaries of property in the wilderness, but ends up driving the Aboriginals out, hoping every day that some of them are left hiding.



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Works Cited

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Braun, S. Stewart. “Rescuing Indigenous Land Ownership: Revising Locke’s Account of Original Appropriation through Cultivation.” Theoria: A Journal of Social & Political Theory, vol. 61, no. 139, June 2014, pp. 68–89. EBSCOhost, https://doi-org.libproxy.scu.edu/10.3167/th.2014.6113904. Hamilton, Jennifer Mae. “‘Labour against Wilderness’ and the Trouble with Property beyond The Secret River.” Green Letters: Studies in Ecocriticism, vol. 20, no. 2, 2016, pp. 140–55. EBSCOhost, https://doi-org.libproxy.scu.edu/10.1080/14688417.2016.1166066. Herrero, Dolores. “Crossing The Secret River: From Victim to Perpetrator, or the Silent/Dark Side of the Australian Settlement.” Atlantis: Revista de La Asociación Española de Estudios Anglo-Norteamericanos, vol. 36, no. 1, June 2014, pp. 87–105. EBSCOhost, search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=mlf&AN=2014701697&site=ehost-live&scope=site. Troy, Jakelin. “Language Contact in Ear...
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