Cirrus@Austlit

'This article examines the competing narratives of settlement in Kate Grenville's 2005 novel, The Secret River. On the one hand are Aboriginal stories of violent encounters with settlers that are transmitted orally and are unwritten and, on the other, are those European historical accounts that seek to legitimate Australian settlement.'

The article argues that Grenville's attempts to reconcile 'her own ancestor's implication in acts of Indigenous dispossession' with an acknowledgement of 'the strengths and courage' of acts of European settlement 'is fraught with complexities,' and 'open to ambiguities and to accusations of "whitewashing" the past' (7).

'In Corfu, Robert Dessaix establishes a dialectic between myth and reality, the heroic and the ordinary, through the apt use of allusion: his novel is richly tinctured with Homer and Chekhov, Sappho and C.P. Cavafy' (37). Henrickson in this essay draws out and comments on the multiple layers of allusion through which Dessaix's novel works.