With her new novel, The Lieutenant, about to be published, Kate Grenville is interviewed in "The Courier-Mail" by Matthew Condon.
Despite her enviable backlist, including Lilian's Story, Dark Places, Joan Makes History and The Idea of Perfection (winner of the Orange Prize), the novel about convict William Thornhill and his family scratching out a new life in the earliest days of white Australia carried her into a new literary stratosphere.However, it also altered her view of herself and her work.
"The more important transformation was the inner journey that I went through which gave me a sense that I belong here in Australia," she says by phone from her home in Canberra.
"That my obligation, as well as my desire, was to understand more, to find out more, to open myself up to its past.
"I think before, like many Australians, and at some deep level, I was looking overseas, thinking of myself as some sort of European.
"I really don't any more."
The Lieutenant is Grenville's second window into the origins of NSW settlement, and is as positive and touching as The Secret River is sad and brutal. Grenville said the two books formed a mirror image, are "kind of yin and yang".
