Iain Brash Prize Winner

In her own margins: Kate Grenville's Searching for the Secret River as marginalia to The Secret River.

Anica Boulanger-Mashberg
University of Tasmania

The textual margins of Kate Grenville’s The Secret River extend beyond the material boundaries of the book, and in these abstract margins Grenville pencils extensive marginalia to her own novel. While Grenville’s authorial commentary does not constitute literal marginalia, this paper constructs a reading model which pairs two of Grenville’s texts to form a composite narrative. The second text within this narrative, Searching for the Secret River, functions as public authorial marginalia. In this marginal commentary, Grenville is able to demonstrate a self-reflexive investigation of the historiographic concerns of the writing of historical novels. Particularly, this is explored through one of the composite narrative’s central concerns: the search for belonging. This search is present in both primary and annotative text, and the postcolonial experiences explored in Searching for the Secret River present marginal commentary to the colonial issues of The Secret River.