In this essay, Sheila Collingwood-Whittick states: 'Kate Grenville's The Secret River, an elegantly-written, meticulously-crafted and extremely readable novel, provides a classic example of white Australian anxiety and ambivalence over the nation's origins. More significantly perhaps, and in direct contradiction with the author's declarations about her book, The Secret River is paradigmatic both of the difficulty settler descendants have in facing some of the grim truths of colonial history, and of their consequent inability to exorcise the ghosts that haunt the national conscience.' (p. 126)