The Settlement by Jock Serong
About Jack Serong
Jock Serong’s novels have received the ARA Historical Novel Prize, the Colin Roderick Award, the Ned Kelly Award for First Fiction and, internationally, the inaugural Staunch Prize (UK) and the Historia Award for Historical Crime Fiction (France). He lives with his family on Victoria’s far west coast.
A Quote from Jack Serong
“I’m so thrilled and honoured that The Settlement is among the shortlist for this year’s ARA Historical Novel Prize, especially because it means the story of Tasmania’s palawa and pakana peoples might reach new readers. A great deal of other historical writing about Tasmania is taking place now, bringing forth important new perspectives, and I’m grateful to have contributed to the discussion.”
About The Settlement
On the windswept point of an island at the edge of Van Diemen’s Land, the Commandant huddles with a small force of white men and women. He has gathered together, under varying degrees of coercion and duress, the last of the Tasmanians, or so he believes. His purpose is to save them—from a number of things, but most pressingly from the murderous intent of the pastoral settlers on their country.
The orphans Whelk and Pipi, fighting for their survival against the malevolent old man they know as the Catechist, watch as almost everything proves resistant to the Commandant’s will. The wind, the spread of disease, the strange black dog that floats in on the prow of a wrecked ship…But above all the chief, the leader of the exiles, before whom the Commandant performs a sordid dance of intimacy and betrayal.
In The Settlement, Jock Serong reimagines in urgent, compelling prose the ill-fated exploits of George Augustus Robinson at the settlement of Wybalenna—a venture whose blinkered, self-interested cruelty might stand for the colonial enterprise itself.
A Qu0te from the Judging Panel
“This work is the final, and perhaps the finest, in Jock Serong’s trilogy on the invasion and settlement of the islands of Bass Strait in the early 19th century.”
“By itself, the narrative is powerful, gripping, haunting.”
“Read in the context of 21st-century Australia, it offers a commentary for now and for all times. As the nation edges toward a referendum to decide on the question of granting Indigenous peoples a voice in our Constitution, the novel offers an uncomfortable reminder of why that very question is being asked – indeed, needs to be asked. And fundamental to a reading of The Settlement is that other question: Who can, and should, write history? Serong’s answer bristles and blazes.”
“Importantly, The Settlement does not usurp the voices of First Nations peoples. Nor does it flinch from the violence, the treachery and, inevitably, the guilt accompanying the British as they seek to “civilise” landscapes, peoples, even Nature itself. Yet the invaders are not painted as all evil. Sensitively, unflinchingly, Serong restores to them their flawed humanity, perhaps inspired by the book’s epigraph:
“… Now all we understand is that we don’t understand. But we come in humility, and in guilt, knowing that in some way we are all murderers, we are all cannibals, and the dead have been our victims.” (Randolph Stow)
“The Settlement is testament to Serong’s oeuvre: exceptional and detailed research, meaningful consultation with First Nations peoples, fierce and incisive characterisations, and prose that sears to the very soul.”
