PROLIFIC HISTORICAL AUTHOR Kate Grenville’s latest book Unsettled: A journey through time and place (Black Inc.) documents her gutsy journey ‘up country’ into northern inland New South Wales, serving up excellent fodder for city slickers intent on reading about reconciliation between First Nations and settler Australians.

As she ruminates on colonial blindspots at country town memorials, pubs, farm gates and creeks, Grenville delivers her signature inner dialogue, heartfelt and tense; but as the discoveries about her ancestors mount up, she gets increasingly tetchy and judges the current locals at every step.

I found myself wincing at her portrayal of some who would be easily identifiable to residents of various towns. These scenes are replete with assumptions that require journalistic triangulation to achieve any objectivity, and the solution was always just a few interviews away.

Yet the author often describes accelerating away from encounters she finds fearful, such as a farmer wondering why she’s parked on his driveway. It makes the author’s road trip less about discovery (heck, he might have just been wondering if Grenville had a flat tyre) and more of a drive-by trolling, like the Greens bussing to Queensland’s mining heartland from Melbourne expecting to bring ideologies together.

The old saying about catching more flies with honey instead of vinegar applies, particularly in the country. Dialogue would have led the author to places where reconciliation grows beyond the libraries and the cenotaphs, driven by passionate people making a difference at the coalface. Instead, this book stands to alienate many in the regions Grenville travelled through.

Where Unsettled achieves for metro readers is its roadmap, literal and emotional. Still, I’m baffled about who Grenville hopes to inspire as she exhorts the reader to take up the necessary process of looking back, particularly at our forbears and finding out what they did. This is where the lasting message of this book (that when you know about something, you know) hits a roadblock, because who wants to replicate such a lonely rural getaway, chasing ghosts who very likely did bad things?

I do, and I recognise a lot of myself in Grenville, because I often haunt the landscapes of my ancestors. They are my heartlands, and they certainly saw Frontier War crimes. The driveway to the property where my parents farmed in the 1970s marks the eastern boundary of the Myall Creek district, site of the 1838 massacre of Indigenous people, infamous because some of its white perpetrators were tried and hanged.

My family didn’t settle there until long after the Gamilaroi people had been almost dispossessed of their country. We were among the many generations to benefit from the clearances, yet the crime and my knowledge of it since childhood has always been the source of my reconciliation actions.

Sometimes my efforts are public, such as campaigning for the Yes vote in the 2023 Voice Referendum. Sometimes they are private, but certainly they would have been invisible to Grenville on her quick turnaround in my region.

What I was expecting her to do in Unsettled is that thing most journalists dread: a death knock. This requires door-stopping people, raising awkward questions with those who likely don’t want to talk, yet listening without judgement.

Rural journos also know there is no point stopping halfway up any driveway. A few words leaning on a farm gate while you declare your intentions, or over a cuppa and a scone at the kitchen table, have the potential to bridge pretty big divides.

The death knocks for Myall Creek have been done across three centuries, predominantly by locals for locals. All that is left is for more Australians to listen, and had Grenville attended the annual Myall Creek Memorial weekend in June, instead of her solo walk at the site, her book would have undoubtedly been informed by this vibrant, living reconciliation action now in its 25th year. The sight of so many New Englanders showing up at the ceremony and simply listening is a quiet balm that must be experienced in person.

It should, by now, be inspiring more such rural events nationally. Instead, a growing city/country divide in this country sees more and more outsiders baffled by places like the New England, and Unsettled does little to build bridges.

Grenville deserves credit for attempting to see the colonised landscape for what it is and pushing against the lies within the language rural Australian in particular has used since the Frontier Wars. Her acts of quietly and privately thinking her way through the pervasive de-humanising that was wrought in Australia are extremely powerful, and in many ways justify the lonely nature of the trip.

She absolutely nails her strongest argument when she observes the jingoistic habit of professing love for a stolen country, and how the depth of that ardour can never erase the fact that it was stolen. In my travels, I see just as many signs of that in city suburbs as I do in the bush.

Unsettled is one of many journeys the author has taken following the trails of her ancestors, and her explorer’s observations are deeply meaningful to her. Whether Grenville unearthed any larger truths – the note that she reaches for at the end – is on the rest of us.

It takes more than one person visiting a place to settle anything about it.