Based on a True Story The Lieutenant by Kate Grenville
The past may be a foreign country, but we can all try to learn its language.
Kate Grenville
How does a historical fiction writer find her material? What are the pitfalls of writing about real people who are no longer here? What obligations does a novelist have to history’s facts? These are questions that I am sure will be discussed during the 2009 Ubud Writer’s and Readers Festival at which award winning, Australian writer, Kate Grenville, will be a noted speaker.
Historical fiction is a rich genre that dates all the way back to the blind bard, Homer. Since then we have gladly accepted his words in order to enter history and to reap the delights of story. But, when the words ‘based on a true story’ appear on the screen preceding a film, I can’t help but wonder what the actual story was and how much it is still true. A devil’s advocate would answer with his own question: “What difference does it make as long as the story is compelling and well told?” It makes a difference because veracity inspires us precisely because the facts are “stranger than fiction’. When a compelling story complete with remarkable characters emerges from the silence of history the WOW factor kicks in and fuels the imagination.
That rush of adrenalin, that WOW factor, made the hairs on Kate Grenville’s neck stand up when she read an extract from William Dawes’ notebooks written in the late 1700s. The historical account brings to light a young Lieutenant (Dawes) one of 200 British marines sent to Australia to start a penal colony with 800 prisoners in 1788. Dawes is interested in astronomy and mathematics. He is a natural linguist. He sets up an observatory on an isolated point of land. This scholar and solider respects the scientific method and keeps meticulous notes that become a chronicle of a unique cross-cultural friendship with a teenage indigenous girl, Patyegarang, one of the indigenous Gadigal people who are the traditional owners of the land that now makes up inner-city Sydney.
Grenville stated that as she read the notebooks she could sense that:
between the lines of those conversations, an astonishing and perhaps unique relationship is recorded. Dawes and Patyegarang clearly enjoyed each other’s company and the play of each other’s minds. Across gulfs of culture, language, age and perhaps even personality, they forged a friendship that was affectionate, playful and witty.
The scientific observer in Dawes is overcome by a transformation so strong that some readers of the texts think Dawes fell in love with Patyegarang, or at least with the Gadigal themselves. The records show that Dawes protested being put on a team sent to
capture or bring back six indigenous men, but if this proved `impracticable’, then six were to be killed and their heads cut off and brought back. Hatchets and bags were provided for the purpose.
This act was meant to put fear into the indigenous neighbors of the Gadigal, who were accused of fatally spearing a ‘gameskeeper’ convict from the penal colony. Dawes reluctantly went on the vengeance expedition but the crews returned without a single capture and Dawes said he would not go on any future such assignments. He risked grave punishment and even death for taking this position. His relationship with Patyegarang may have prompted Dawes to ask his superior officers to allow him to remain in Australia when his tour of duty elapsed. His request was denied and he was sent back with the other marines and never returned:
He spent the rest of his life working for the Abolition movement in London, Africa and the West Indies. When slavery was abolished he set up schools for former slaves and later died in Antigua.
These are the facts on record. But it is here that the imagination of an historical novelist like Kate Grenville really catches fire and the human drama between the lines of facts and figures emerges.
Grenville states her thoughts about the historical Dawes in an essay on her 2008 novel The Lieutenant.
The choice that Dawes made when ordered on the punitive expedition - a choice between his future prospects and some emotional or moral imperative - is richly enigmatic. Why did he risk severe punishment and disgrace, when doing so made no difference to anything?
Reading the notebooks, there’s a strong sense of a person being transformed before our eyes. A man of science discovers another, more fluid way of engaging with the world; a detached observer becomes deeply involved not just intellectually but emotionally; a Lieutenant in His Majesty’s service decides he can no longer be part of the imperial machine. In coming to know the Gadigal people, William Dawes was irrevocably changed.
All this, then, was the raw material I had to work with in writing a novel. Without the notebooks I would never have thought to imagine a friendship like the one between Dawes and Patyegarang. Even if I had thought such a thing might have happened, I wouldn’t have attempted to write it. How would you even begin to invent those unimaginable conversations?
But, Grenville did go on to imagine the conversations, situations, and characters and to write The Lieutenant. And we readers are all the richer for her efforts.
