Author Interview: Kate Grenville - Tales of a new-found land

That's what Australian writer Kate Grenville has been doing while working on her new novel, The Lieutenant, based on the true story of 18th century astronomer William Dawes: sitting in her garden, star chart in hand, gazing at the southern skies.

"I found it extremely moving to look up at the sky and think, this is exactly the same sky that Dawes looked up at – or almost the same," she says. "I looked at the stars and felt there was a kind of triangulation happening. I couldn't see him, but I could see what he saw."

Stargazing is also the metaphor she uses to explain her decision to write historical fiction. "You actually see a star best by looking slightly to one side of it. I think it's a bit the same with ideas. If you want to write about an idea in the present time, it can be better to write about the past in a way that brings up the same idea. Something about the distance, paradoxically, enables you to get very close to the subject."

Grenville is one of Australia's top contemporary novelists, winning the Orange Prize in 2001. Her 2006 novel The Secret River, a tense, vivid narrative set in the days of the early convict settlers, based on the life of her great-great-great grandfather, seemed like a departure both from her comfort zone and from contemporary relevance.

In fact it was neither. In a nation wrestling with its history, it was immensely timely. White Australians hungry to discover their past devoured it. It sold 500,000 copies worldwide, won the Commonwealth Writers Prize and was shortlisted for the Booker.

The Lieutenant is set 30 years earlier, when the first settlers from England arrived in Australia. Daniel Rooke (based on Dawes) is a young second lieutenant on the First Fleet in 1788, an astronomer and linguist who sets out to learn the language of the local Aboriginal people. Dawes left behind two notebooks (now in the School of Oriental and African Studies in London) detailing entire conversations, particularly with one teenage girl, which Grenville uses verbatim.

"Between the lines … is the most amazingly warm, playful, affectionate relationship. I thought: what sort of a person was Dawes that he was able to overcome all the prejudices and ignorance of his time and place? As their relationship continued, he was given an order that forced him to choose between that friendship and his duty. Those things combined were like a red rag to the bull of the novelist."

She describes The Lieutenant as "a kind of mirror image" to The Secret River, "a yin to its yang". While the first speaks of the breakdown of communication between indigenous and settler Australians with violent consequences, the second leaves the lines of communication tentatively open. Grenville, who previously described her country as being in denial about its past, is now more hopeful.

Last February, Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd offered the first public apology on behalf of parliament to the country's indigenous minorities for past mistreatment by the state. "That would have been unimaginable, possibly even 15 years ago," she says. "I was on the lawns of Parliament House when the Prime Minister made that apology. He kept talking about conversation, dialogue, all that kind of thing, and I suddenly realised that I had actually written a book in tune with what he was saying. The Lieutenant, to my great joy, is not just a book about the past, it offers a kind of model for the possibility of conversation here and now."

It is also the engaging story of an awkward, bookish man who sets out for an unknown continent and finds himself. As his linguistic discoveries refuse to obey the ordered tables of word translations and verb conjugations, he realises he is learning not only a language but a new way of seeing the world. "I thought of him as a seed waiting to unfurl," says Grenville. "He has extraordinary aptitudes, but nothing in his life has yet happened to bring him to life as a human being. What happens with his relationship with the girl in the story is that seed sprouts, he discovers what it is not just to be intellectual but to have a full emotional life as well. I got very fond of him as I wrote about him."

Yet Grenville does not ignore the difficult parts of the story: the wider relationship between settlers and indigenous peoples which endangers Rooke's fragile dialogue; the fact that the language he tried to learn no longer exists. Like three-quarters of Aboriginal languages it has died out as its use was discouraged and speakers died out. Dawes's notebooks are the best record we have of it.

At school, Grenville says she was led to believe that the Aboriginal population "conveniently faded from view", depleted by Western infections against which they had no immunity. "When I wrote The Secret River and read what the historians are now uncovering about the extent of deliberate killing, it was hugely confronting to me. If you realise that your people have moved in and killed native people and forcibly displaced them, that is something you have to think pretty long and hard about."

Yet, difficult as the process was, learning her history left her feeling more comfortable with being Australian. "We were also taught that nothing Australian had any value. The only great writing came from Britain, the only real Christmas was a Christmas with snow. I always felt as an Australian that I had a very shallow grip on my own native land. As a result of writing these two books, I feel as if I've truly said: 'Yes, this is my home.' "

Grenville braced herself for a backlash to The Secret River but none came. What she did encounter was a bevy of angry historians accusing her of playing fast and loose with the dividing lines between history and fiction and disputing the idea that imagination can take us close to the past.

"I know perfectly well I'm not writing history," she retorts. "I'm writing fiction that wants to pay respect to the past by getting it as correct as I can. I think it's a bit of a non-argument. From Homer onwards, people have been writing historical fiction. To me, anything that illuminates what it is to be human is a worthwhile endeavour. History is one way of doing that, fiction is another." But as if in a nod to her detractors, she writes a historian into The Lieutenant. Like Rooke, Captain Silk is based on a historical figure who left "an absolutely charming and slightly self-serving account of the First Fleet". Rooke likes him but instinctively distrusts a man whose first concern is always for the saleability of his narrative.

A writer, then? Grenville laughs. "One of the things I'm interested in is historiography, how we arrive at our idea of what has happened in the past. We need to query those sources, how true were they, who were they writing for. As a novelist I'm almost saying: 'This is a novel, you have to use your own initiative in thinking about what happens between the lines'. There is no such thing as a neutral text."

Unlike Silk, however, she employs strict principles: invent only to fill gaps between recorded facts; add only the most plausible scenarios. Even so, Grenville shrank from the possibility of imagining the Aboriginal characters, and eventually did so only by imagining them through Rooke's eyes.

"As a non-indigenous Australian I really can't enter that other world. It's hard enough to imagine an 18th-century astronomer. Also, I think there is a kind of ethical thing about telling other people's stories. There's a generation of Aboriginal writers now who are doing all kinds of amazing things, and for us non-indigenous writers to be telling their stories, it's wrong ethically, but it's also wrong in terms of the narrative craft."

She is now writing the third book of a historic trilogy. Set a generation after The Secret River, the forthcoming book imagines the world of an illiterate settler wife based loosely on her great-grandmother. "I have had to reconstruct her world from a standing start. I seem always to want to take on something harder with every book. It's a real challenge to get beyond the stereotypical pioneer wife bending over a scrubbing board, fighting the snakes; to get beyond that and think she must also have also been a woman who looked at the stars."

The Lieutenant by Kate Grenville is published by Canongate, priced 12.99.