VCE TEXT REVIEW: The Lieutenant, by Kate Grenville
VCE Text Review:
The Lieutenant by Kate Grenville
Kate Grenville has produced three outstanding historical novels: The Secret River (2005), The Lieutenant (2008) and Sarah Thornhill (2011); where she vividly imagines Australia’s early white settlement and its contentious encounters with the indigenous population.
The Lieutenant gives us her imagining of the world of the First Fleet of 1788, from the perspective of her protagonist Daniel Rooke, an astronomer and linguist.
The eponymous “Lieutenant” is based on the historical figure William Dawes, who was indeed a young lieutenant of marines, astronomer, mathematician and linguist and present during a punitive expedition in Botany Bay, which is pivotal in the novel.
Grenville explicitly drew from Dawes’s language notebooks to give authenticity to her protagonist’s relationship with an Aboriginal girl, Patyegarang, of the Cadigal tribe.
It is an excellent text to consider issues of Australian identity and cultural conflict.
Grenville’s novel is set against a background of British colonialism which profited from slavery in the islands of Jamaica and Antigua.
It is also a chastened British Empire, dramatically reduced in territory after defeat by the American colonies in the American War of Independence (1775-1783).
Daniel is wounded in 1781, during a naval battle with the French fleet providing support to American colonists against the British blockade of Chesapeake Bay.
The historical context shows the British desperately wanted new lands and suggests British respect for indigenous rights in the new colony of New South Wales, to be improbable given the empire’s dependence upon the institution of slavery.
Conflict over land between the Europeans and the indigenous appeared inevitable.
While Governor Gilbert instructed: “The natives are on all occasions to be treated with amity and kindness” (61) the natives appeared to be fearful or sceptical and kept their distance.
Despite his mild words the Governor soon resorted to violence to forcefully communicated the terms of white occupation.
“Brought in, that is what he (the Governor), calls it. The natives were brought in. Never mind that they were kidnapped. Violently. Against their will.”(112)
“They cried out, Rooke,” Gardiner exclaimed.
“By God you should have heard them crying out.
“He had the shackles put on them.” (111).
Governor Gilbert aimed to carry out his mission to “civilise” the kidnapped and make them slaves of the empire. British colonisation intended “sovereignty over every man black or white, every object great or small, and every relationship of whatever sort that might take place in his (George the Third’s) kingdom”. (170)
There seemed no alternative, but to follow this course. Conscientious objection wasn’t an option for His Majesty’s officers. Even though Lieutenant Gardiner deeply regretted his participation in the capture “I wish to God I had not done it,” Daniel knew no hint of questioning an order, “of insubordination could be tolerated,” (113). Secretly he wondered: “What would I have done in the same place?” (113).
On the other hand Daniel’s voluntary isolation from the settlement created opportunities for a different encounter. The isolation suited him because of his lack of ease with his fellow officers “a man on this promontory would be part of the settlement but not in it” (69).
It also gave him the opportunity to reflect and observe, overtly Dr. Vickery’s comet, but seclusion also offered an opportunity for the indigenous to approach him on their terms.
Members of local tribes did visit and he met a young girl, Tagaran, who shared Daniel’s curiosity about new peoples and his facility with languages. She was “reading him in just the same way he was trying to read her”. (147). They shared “word by half-understood word,” (191) and a special friendship based on trust developed. She named him “Kamara”, friend.
Friendship came with complications. “Understanding went in both directions. Once two people shared language, they could no longer hide” (215). She asked him to intercede when she was beaten by a marine from the First Fleet ship, Charlotte. Frustrated with his inaction, Tagaran demanded he demonstrate how to load his musket.
Grenville shows reciprocal communication leads to questions of trust and loyalty. Hitherto Daniel had a naive assumption their relationship could be insulated from the growing conflict between their races.
Eventually Daniel is forced out of his hiding, to make an existentialist choice.
The catalyst for Daniel comes after Silk selects him to be the navigator for a punitive expedition to punish the Botany Bay natives for the fatal spearing of Brugden, the governor’s gamekeeper. “The gun is the only language the buggers will understand.” (241).
Daniel warns Tagaran of the expedition, but he realised to be faithful to his friend, warning would not be enough, because he was implicated as long as he was a marine.
“What he could see now was that he was exactly as guilty as the governor and as Silk. Like them, he had allowed self-interest to blind him.” (280).
Grenville’s novel artfully shows readers how passive individuals can contribute to injustice with the perpetrators by their silence. Daniel made the fateful decision to break the silence.
“I cannot be part of this,” he said aloud. (282)
Reading:
Kate Grenville, The Lieutenant, Text Publishing, 2008
http://www.englishworks.com.au/lieutenant-kate-grenville/
http://www.theguardian.com/books/2009/jan/31/the-lieutenant-kate-grenville
Mike Toomey teaches VCE English at St John’s Regional College, Dandenong