In much of her work – The Secret River, The Lieutenant and later A Room Made of Leaves and Restless Dolly Maunder – Kate Grenville has turned to historical archives as source material. But when she chanced upon a furious letter about a schoolteacher in northern New South Wales, she wasn’t sure there would be enough there. But Joseph Connor, a rural educator in the 1880s, had been accused of viciously beating and maltreating children in the town where her grandmother grew up – and the story wouldn’t let her go. “Powerful emotion of any kind is irresistible to a novelist,” she explained in a recent interview.
So she kept reading. In 1884, just a few years after public schooling was made law, Connor was appointed the sole teacher at the school in Currabubula, a tiny town on Gomeroi country (also spelled Kamilaroi or Gamilaraay). Through letters, reports and transcripts from the archives, Grenville pieces together a hazy picture of the decade that follows: as he fathered more and more children of his own, there were anonymous complaints, petty feuds, and arguments with parents over fees. Then there were accusations that Connor had seriously beaten and “marked” several children; one lost a finger. There were inquiries and court hearings, but nothing was really proved. After 11 pregnancies, Connor’s exhausted wife died; a few years later, so did he.
Grenville’s “odd hybrid” of a book tracks her effort to read between the lines and guess what really happened – not a novel, but not exactly history either. “The documents are real, but the rest is story,” she writes. She has said she didn’t want to “play god” with these real people’s lives by deciding, even fictionally, who did what – all names, even Connor’s, have been changed to reflect this. Her lively eye for historical and human detail offers some of the book’s most enjoyable moments, in flashes of the novel it might have been: in the “graceless” way Connor stands for a photo, or a rare playful moment imagined between his wife and daughter amid endless nappies and croup.
And although the man at the centre of this book will be unknown to readers, The Country Schoolmaster: A Mystery in 88 Letters is gossipy and gripping, like time travelling down a particularly juicy thread on the r/AustralianTeachers subreddit. Grenville invites the reader to play detective and judge with her as she tries to work out what kind of man Connor really was: the frontier educator, sweating in the dust to plant trees that shaded “generations of children”; or the lying control freak, unusually violent, even in a time when corporal punishment was legal.
Either way, he’s an outsider, caught between “a penny-pinching government” and farmers suddenly deprived of free help by school attendance laws. For every suspicious omission by Connor, there seems to be a reasonable explanation, or a neighbour with a grudge; “Maybe there’s nothing here at all,” Grenville ponders at one point. “Trying to make sense of these scraps of the past has been like grabbing at water,” she writes – and Connor’s own “slipperiness” with the truth leaves “a residue, like a grubby bathring”.
He may be dealing with stress, grief and 70-odd students crammed into a single room but, as Grenville writes, “what a man does under pressure reveals some fundamentals about the ways he’s made”. Her ongoing preoccupation with the “darker possibilities” of the human soul at snapping point is at the heart of perhaps her most famous novel, The Secret River. Here, as there, treatment of such moments skirts uncomfortably close to voyeurism. Grenville’s forensic fascination with “who and when, and how many, and on what parts of the body” may make sense for this cold case format, but it jars with her otherwise often jovial first-person narration: someone who’s “a bit of a tree planter myself”, who refers to pig and cow manure as “poop”, suddenly imagining the dark “exhilaration” of Connor as he delivers a backhand slap to a child across the face.
Grenville has built a garlanded literary career teasing out the elusiveness of historical “truth”, weaving fact with imagination to tell stories of Australia’s colonisation; envisioning her own ancestors and interrogating their lives on stolen land. Inevitably, in this tale of pressure and morality, Grenville grapples with the question of power: Connor’s, his department’s, his community’s, even her own, reflecting with shame on the way she policed peers’ hemlines as a prefect. What she does not engage with in as much depth is how Connor’s power, or lack of it, impacted Aboriginal children and families around Currabubula. The book leads with a short paragraph about the Gomeroi people, and one letter prompts Grenville to reflect briefly on the “very white” school photo, wondering if students were turned away under the exclusion by demand policy – but that scenario is not further explored.
It is something of an ethical credo for reviewers to not critique what is absent – and Grenville implies that there is not enough information in the archives for her to sketch more fully realised Aboriginal characters. But in the case of an author so professionally committed to reckoning with settler accountability, who has spent so much time imaginatively inhabiting the lives of a school community, telling this story without really exploring the education system’s racist policies and looming role as a tool of dispossession and assimilation is a notable elision.
The Country Schoolmaster is Grenville’s account of trying to make up her mind about true events with limited information. Constantly tantalised and frustrated by the archive, she reaches a “final” position about Connor, only to uncover new information that totally changes her view. I don’t quite buy that a historical novelist is so “shocked” to find there are rarely clear answers. But her point, a didactic coda explains, is that making up your mind irrevocably about anything is “dangerous”; she presents her “dogged hunt” for truth in uncertainty as a metaphor for this political moment, in which oversimplified narratives are weaponised, and in which we should never jump to conclusions.
The Country Schoolmaster by Kate Grenville is out now through Black Inc
