![]() He was apprenticed to a waterman named Mr. A flashback shows the early life of Thornhill in London. ![]() The European convicts are not permitted to leave, the Aboriginals are spiritually part of the land and do not desire to leave. Two very different groups are occupying the same land. When the man approaches Thornhill, seemingly out of nowhere, Thornhill tells him to, “Be off!” The native simply repeats his words back to him symbolically setting in motion the central conflict of the novel. His first night in a convict settlement in Sydney includes his first encounter with an Aboriginal. Instead of being executed, however, he and his family are sent to New South Wales in Australia. In 1806, he is convicted of stealing wood and sentenced to death. ![]() ![]() William Thornhill was born into poverty, leading to a life of crime in the slums of London. In Searching for the Secret River, she tells of doing the research for the first book and of how that book was initially conceived as a biographical work about a familial ancestor Solomon Wiseman. ![]() In 2006, Grenville published a work of nonfiction as a follow-up to The Secret River. The story examines the colonization of the land of the Aborigines by the Europeans. In Kate Grenville’s 2005 novel The Secret River, William Thornhill is a nineteenth-century Englishman who, facing a death sentence for theft, is sent to Australia instead. ![]()
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