In the 1830s, when South Australia was formally established as a British province for the purposes of colonisation, a commitment was made to protect the traditional rights and lands of its indigenous people. An honourable undertaking, perhaps, but in the event little honoured. Even where they escaped genocide and forced dispossession, the creeping consequence of white settlement – the fencing and farming of land, the arrogation of fresh water sources, the dissemination of disease, the steady, stubborn erosion of language and culture – were to prove catastrophic to the Indigenous Australians.
The shame and guilt of these injustices pervade Lucy Treloar’s debut novel, Salt Creek. Her English forebears were among the first white settlers in this remote region and they left behind them tantalising scraps of their ultimately unsuccessful enterprise: a letter describing a miserable journey, the discovery that a mixed-race Indigenous boy once lived on the family farm. From these fragments Treloar has conjured Stanton Finch and his family who, impoverished by a series of failed business ventures, travel to the Coorong, on the South Australian coast, to try their luck at cattle farming. Both Finch’s wife and his well-to-do parents-in-law advise against the move, but the proud, stubbornly optimistic Finch is determined to prove them wrong. As his eldest daughter Hester resignedly observes: “He has spent most of his life hoping, I think.”
We know from the outset that the Finches’ venture is ill-fated. As the novel opens, Hester, rescued by a legacy from her grandparents, is living comfortably in England but she is not at peace. Amid “the blush of late winter woods and shadows as soft as blossom and sheep like clotted cream”, she finds herself yearning for “the salt bone bleached world of the Coorong”. This prefiguring of failure lends an elegiac quality to the story that then unfolds. The long and dusty journey from Adelaide to their new home, Hester tells us, “was like moving knowingly, dutifully, towards death”. Even their makeshift house, constructed from wood reclaimed from shipwrecks, carries tragedy in its walls.
And yet at first it seems as though the farm might just succeed. Despite tensions with the indigenous Ngarrindjeri people, Stanton is convinced they can coexist peacefully: he encourages the education of Tully, a quick and curious Indigenous boy, and it is not long before Tully is living and working on the Finches’ farmstead. But as the setbacks pile up, Stanton’s hopefulness shrivels into something bitter and intractable, and his large, lively family begins inexorably to fall apart. Coexistence is only possible, it seems, on the white man’s terms.
From its opening paragraphs, the failure of the colonial experiment, to civilise to improve, to bring reconciliation, haunts this novel. In a recent interview with the Guardian Treloar spoke of her anxieties in writing about Indigenous issues. She worried, she said, about “re-enacting that cultural thing which I was also critiquing, that idea I could just march in and do what I wanted”. By exploring her characters through Hester’s eyes, she has largely avoided that pitfall. Hester is a fine narrator, clever, thoughtful, strong-willed, caught always between her longing for freedom and the constraints of loyalty and responsibility, but she is very much of her time. As for Treloar, she is mostly too subtle a writer to be preachy. A darkening tone is lit with sparks of sharp-eyed humour; a visiting trooper drinks his tea from his saucer, “his magnificent whiskers resting on its rim like a hearth-rug”.
Instead Treloar has fallen into a different trap. Like many first-time historical novelists she is head over heels in love not only with her characters but with her research. Too many of her large cast have speaking parts and not enough to say. The result, especially in the first half, is a narrative of uneven pace, weighed down by excessive detail and unnecessary repetition.
At its best, Salt Creek is a love song to a lost world; the story is freighted throughout with the impossibility of changing the story or making amends. Hester’s life in the saltbush is isolated and harsh, the drudgery is unceasing, but from the start she is seduced by the wild beauty of the landscape: at dawn “the water glinted blue and the vapour lifting above the peninsula gave its sand hills and vegetation the appearance of a watercolour, as if it represented something real but was not real itself”. There are many moments when the precision of Treloar’s poetry stops the heart. Yes, it is too long, but within its pages is a very fine novel struggling to get free.
• Clare Clark’s We That Are Left is published by Vintage. Salt Creek by Lucy Treloar is published by Aardvark Bureaux (£14.99). To order a copy for £12.74, go to guardianbookshop.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min. p&p of £1.99.
