Well, having just read her utterly delightful contribution to Australia's bicentennial in 1988, Joan Makes History, I understand now that Kate's a greater threat than Secret River and indeed a worthy opponent for Inga. Joan Makes History is hard to describe without giving too much away, though the magic is as much in how she does it as in what she does. The book alternates chapters narrating, in the first person, the life of a woman, Joan, born the day of Australian Federation in 1901 (a minor character in an earlier novel of Grenville's, apparently), and eleven episodes from Australian history reimagined and narrated by women - always named Joan, and determined to make history - who were there but not mentioned by male historians. Australia's cherished historical myths and turning-points are turned on their heads and sides by convict women, washerwomen, farmers, Aboriginal women, wives (including the admittedly imaginary wife of Captain Cook), and the anonymous woman living off the bush who appears in the apparently very famous painting "On the Wallaby Track" (1896) by Frederick McCubbin (below). Quite a romp: Grenville's a fantastic writer, often raucously funny and as often incredibly subtle and even profound.
By two-thirds of the way through the book, we start to notice more than parallels between the two stories - Australia's and the original Joan's. We come to understand that the original Joan has imagined these episodes not just out of some sense of fun or historical revisionism (though there's that too), but as part of owning and accepting her own life. Here are some reflections from the last pages of the book:I thought my story was one the world had never heard before. I loved and was bored, I betrayed and was forgiven, I ran away and returned, and all these things appeared to be personal and highly significant history. Oh Joan, what bogus grandeur! There was not a single joy I could feel that countless Joans had not already felt, not a single mistake I could make that had not been made by some Joan before me.
There was a time when I would have raged against such a thought, or grown petulant. But now that I am such an old woman, and so many times a grandmother, I do not grieve but grow pleased and plump at the idea. I swell like an egg: there is nothing I cannot claim as my own now, and although you may not think so to look at me, I am the entire history of the globe walking down the street. (274-5)
This is where the historian slams on the brakes, but you could also see it as a response avant la lettre to Clendinnen. As our Joan tells of all these other Joans - imagined but realer than the protagonists of most popular history - we don't just see Australian historiography get a feminist sorting out, but start to think in new ways about how and why history matters to ordinary folk. (They're both right, of course.)
A quick internet scan suggests that Joan Makes History lives on in feminist and historiographical circles, but coming at it as a sojourner in this land (my three months anniversary was Tuesday) I see it also as a marvelously insightful commentary on the difficulty of being Australian.
Joan wants to be bigger than Australia, wants a life like the politicians and artists of the old world who have lives bigger than out of the way Australia could ever make possible (she thinks). Eventually she discovers that history is made every day, and that it's made also (and indispensably) by women and women's work. That story could happen in any country. But that her life involves throwing herself into somewhat shallow passion in college, getting pregnant and reluctantly marrying the good-hearted man from the country who fathered the child and loves her although she never loved him, losing the child and abandoning her husband before eventually finding her way back to him and truer love, motherhood, etc. also tells (I think) a story about the difficulty of taking a life in Australia seriously. (Apologies to my Australian readers: I'm asking to be corrected here. Perhaps I read it this way just because I come from self-important America?)Maybe it does have to be in Australia after all, since the absence of a grand but cumbersome history or prospects for sudden significance on the world-historical stage don't just carve out a space for discovering history as made by every one, every day, but in some way requires that discovery. For the very lightness of its historical being, Australia offers a stage for living on a truly human scale.
