'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).