Secrets and lies: Kate Grenville unravels her grandmother’s story

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Kate Grenville’s family is the gift that never stops giving. And for that she has to thank her mother’s sense of history, because Nance kept stuff. That sense has bequeathed to Grenville the historical architecture to write novels such as The Secret River, Sarah Thornhill and now Restless Dolly Maunder.

“I keep burrowing into the family because I think it’s not just for my family. My family is representative of millions of others which are little written about. Look, everybody has a family, and most people don’t have the gift that I had, which was the fact that my mother recorded enough about it.”

As a child Kate Grenville didn’t love her grandmother, but she does now.Credit: Darren James

But when she came to write about Nance in One Life: My Mother’s Story, she did so not as historical fiction but as biography based on Nance’s own “sort of sketchy memoirs”.

Much of the book was about Nance’s complex relationship with her own mother, Dolly Maunder, and much of it accepted Nance’s point of view. However, by the end of the writing Grenville realised as a consequence of her research she knew a lot more about her grandmother. What’s more, she realised she had another story.

But it was not going to be another biography. Reading Janet Malcolm’s The Silent Woman, about the biographies of Sylvia Plath, convinced her not to write about Dolly as non-fiction “because there’s something about the biographical voice that is pretending to know more than anybody can actually ever know about a person. More than we can actually know about ourselves.”

And writing it as a novel based on real events was a familiar method for her.

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“I had a backwards version of who she was. So I just had to kind of unpick that and turn it inside out like a sock and see that all the incidents my mother talked about, if you looked at them differently they would be seen as quite a different sort of interpretation.

“And then I liked the technical challenge of that because the book about Elizabeth Macarthur (A Room Made of Leaves, which was published in 2020 and won the NSW Premier’s award for fiction) was very much about not accepting the sort of standard story. I think I’m fascinated by that whole idea of digging into a story beyond its surface and seeing what happens if you turn it inside out.”

Dolly Maunder was born in 1880, the great-granddaugher of Solomon Wiseman, the real figure at the heart of Grenville’s Booker-shortlisted The Secret River. Dolly wanted to be a teacher, but her father wouldn’t let her. Over my dead body, was the line because it would shame him if he were seen to be unable to support the family financially. “A whole generation of women were condemned to housework and childminding for their lives to save a man’s pride,” Grenville said.

If that wasn’t bad enough, Dolly’s mother encouraged her to marry a man, Bert Russell, whom she didn’t really love, and also kept a secret about him from Dolly. That is until a couple of years into their marriage when she stumbled across a padlocked trunk in a shed on their farm and jemmied it open to make a life-changing discovery.

“It was a terrible thing to do [keep the secret],“Grenville says, “and you can see why she did it. If my grandmother had never opened that trunk and never found the papers, it would have been OK all round.” The lesson, she adds quickly, is destroy the evidence.

Dolly and Bert lived a peripatetic life, starting out on the farm that had belonged to her father and then buying and running a series of pubs, including the Botanyview Hotel in Newtown (“it’s still going strong; I did pop in there”), the Queensland Hotel in Temora (Dolly’s pride and joy), and the very grand Caledonian Hotel in Tamworth.

“But ‘the Calli’ is not even a building now; it’s a car park. I remember standing there on some day of blinding sunlight in the middle of this ghastly car park thinking, ‘Oh my gosh, the pride and joy of my grandparents’ life is now expansive bitumen and gleaming cars’.”

Grenville says if what Dolly discovered when she opened the trunk was the first great wound of her life, leaving Temora was the second. There were rumours of Bert and a nursemaid with whom he may have had an affair.
In her records Nance suggested that was the case, but she didn’t state it definitively.

Kate Grenville holds up the Orange Prize for women’s fiction, which she won in 2001 for her novel The Idea of Perfection.Credit: AP

“I thought wait a minute. This is the loose thread that if I pull it the whole jumper will come unravelled. I used to ask why did Dolly move so much and Mum used to ask as well. It was because buying and selling made you capital, but the fact that my grandfather had an eye for the ladies, suddenly that made sense of the whole thing.”

Dolly and Nance had a fractious sort of relationship. Dolly, like her father, refused to let her daughter become a teacher, but she did push her to become a pharmacist.

While Grenville says she was blessed with her mother, that was not the case for Nance. But writing One Life made Grenville change her own view of Dolly. “What my grandmother gave my mother was the thing that my grandmother had never had, which was basically financial independence and a set of choices in life that my grandmother couldn’t have dreamt of having. And it was because my grandmother bullied my mother into doing pharmacy,” Grenville said.

“It gave my mother, who married a man of, let’s say, intermittent earning ability, the ability to be independent. At any point my mother could, if things had gone bad enough, have left my father, and they were choices her mother hadn’t had.”

There’s a moment in the novel when, late in life, Dolly comes to stay with Nance and her family. Dolly buttonholes the young Kate Grenville and asks, “Do you love me”. Her answer is no.

“I didn’t love her then. All I knew was a frown. But I love her now because I know, even if I haven’t got it quite right exactly, what she thought. I now understand what her difficulties were and the challenges she had to overcome.”

Grenville says she admires and loves her grandmother for pushing against the incredible barriers that the culture imposed.

“I would love to say to her, ‘Grandma, I do love you for your spirit and your courage, your determination and your ingenuity in working out how to make life work for you in an impossible prison which 19th-century women had to live in’.”

The question of being loved also bothered Nance, who asked her daughter as she was dying why Dolly had not loved her.

“I would love to be able to go back to Mum now that I think I know what I do know about Dolly and say, ‘Look, Mum, she did love you. It was a misguided, badly expressed, clumsy, backwards kind of love, but it was the most profound kind of love because she wanted the best for you, to have something much better than she had. And that is truly love’.”

Restless Dolly Maunder is published by Text.

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