Refiguring historical fiction in Australia

International recognition was accorded to Lucy Treloar for her first novel, Salt Creek (2015), when it was short-listed for the 2016 Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction. (Hannah Kent was the second Australian author to be short-listed, in the next year, for her novel The Good People). Thus Treloar was placed in the nominal company of the great writer who invented the historical novel and whose literary influence—at least in the nineteenth century—surpassed all others.

Certainly the private and lending libraries of the colonial Adelaide of Treloar’s novel would have been well stocked with Scott. To what extent the overseas jury recognised Treloar’s signal and unusual contribution to historical fiction in Australia is doubtful. Her ambitious endeavour in Salt Creek was in significant measure to engage in the refiguring of such fiction in her own country. This was not to do with any quixotic use of source materials from the past, for in this her procedures were orthodox, but rather in her revision of literary history, in particular as this related to colonial and inter-war sagas of Australian pioneering, and to the British novels that had such importance for readers in nineteenth-century Australia. For Hester Finch, heroine and narrator of Salt Creek, pre-eminent among those novels was not Scott’s Waverley but Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1848).