‘It does not follow’, E.H. Carr claimed, ‘that because a mountain appears to take on different shapes from different angles of vision, it has objectively no shape at all or an infinity of shapes.’ Taking these words as its epigraph, Kate Grenville’s most recent novel, Sarah Thornhill (2011), announces from the outset its interest in the question of the true shape of things. But what are truth, shape, vision—or indeed mountains? These are more uncertain, more contestable, than Carr or perhaps Grenville herself believes. For we might say that there is no true shape outside vision, that shape is always about perception. In recent Australian fiction—Grenville’s and others’—there has been renewed interest in uncovering the true shape of Australia’s colonial past and to tell its secret stories, but are we once more being given the mountain’s shape as seen from the colonialist’s angle of vision?

Kate Grenville is not alone among contemporary Australian novelists to attempt to tell a different story about the early encounters between the British and Indigenous peoples. Three very recent novels, in their different ways, have revisited the early years of colonialism with the hopeful project of showing that there was once a time, however brief, when relationships between Indigenes and the British still held promise. Grenville’s Sarah Thornhill is set in the early days of New South Wales before distinct lines between ‘white’ and ‘black’ were drawn and when there was nothing socially strange or terrible about a ‘darkie’ being brought up as a member of his white father’s family, or so its narrator claims; Rohan Wilson’s debut novel The Roving Party (2011) imagines a comfortable affinity between John Batman and Black Bill in Van Diemen’s Land in the bloody context of the Black Wars; and Kim Scott’s That Deadman Dance (2010) describes cooperative, friendly relations between British and Indigenous men along the south coast of Western Australia. Each novel follows a trajectory from collaboration to the terrible effects of white greed but each aims not at despair but at the possibility that these supposedly collaborative relations could be retrieved and renewed. Each novel, too, poses a question about the differences and similarities between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians. What can we see and know of each other? Is the distance between us traversable? Where are we joined and where do we remain apart?