Epilogue ‘Thornhill’s Place’

This epilogue section, set approximately a decade after the massacre, is pervaded by a sense of remorse. This remorse is never specifically associated with the massacre, or more broadly with an anxiety of guilt about the colonial enterprise and the European dispossession of Aboriginal land. However, the narrative implies that all of Thornhill’s dissatisfaction can be traced to his participation in the almost total extermination of the Aboriginal people in the area, and to his own sense of uneasy belonging as a colonial settler who inhabits and even claims the land, but can never feel truly at home.

Key Point: Sal takes on Long Jack, injured in the massacre, as ‘something of a project. A penance’ (p. 327). Although the text does not explicitly state the offence for which this penance is being paid, it is clear that Sal feels the need to try to support or perhaps patronize Long Jack, to ease her own guilt at being implicated in his loss of community, culture and land.

Thornhill has achieved his desires Thornhill has achieved his desires. He and Sal are firmly settled on the land; he can afford to furnish their large house, and to buy Sal gifts sent from ‘Home’ He is respected and even thought of as a gentleman. But Sal still longs for home and their conflict over this point ahs become ‘a space of silence between husband and wife’ (p. 324) Although they love each other still, their disagreement, like the memory of the massacre, has become a scar that will never heal as it seems there is ‘no way to speak into that silent place’ between them (p. 325)

The violence between the settlers and Aboriginal people has become a silent place too, but subsumed into Thornhill’s life and future as well as his past: he has bought Sagitty’s old land and Darkey Creek, which has become Thornhill’s Creek. The symbolic name change forces Thornhill to absorb the horrific history of the location into his own name and identity. But at the same time it allows him to inscribe his presence and ownership on the land.

All of Thornhill’s symbols of success in this section are incomplete or unsatisfying. The house, which he has built over the rock engraving – in an attempt to bury not only the Aboriginal cultural past, but his own colonial settler- invader past – is not quite what he had always imagined (p. 315) The portraits he commissions of himself are humiliating, depicting him as more of a fraud than a true gentleman.

Perhaps worst of all, when Thornhill sits in his own ‘favourite spot on the verandah’ each day (p. 330), instead of experiencing triumph, he feels that the bench is ‘like a punishment’ (p. 333) as he scans the land, watching for a glimpse of an Aboriginal person who might have survived the massacre. Thornhill frequently convinces himself that he has glimpsed someone in the bush, only to realise each time that it is ‘just another tree’ (p. 333). His disappointment, and his mood at the end of the novel, is summed up in the short paragraph: ‘Each time, it was a new emptiness’ (p. 333)

QUESTIONS: How has Thornhill changed since his arrival in New South Wales? What is the significance of Thornhill’s interchange with Long Jack on page 329? What is the ‘secret river’ of the novel’s title? (Perhaps the title refers to many ‘secret rivers’ in the novel. For example, could it refer to hidden aspects of Australia’s history, or even to the undercurrents in personal relationships?)