Aboriginal readers are advised that this review
contains the names of deceased persons.

Third in the Furneaux Islands Trilogy, (see my reviews here) The Settlement is Jock Serong's fictionalisation of a dark chapter in Tasmania's history. It was longlisted for the 2023 Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction and the 2023 ALS Gold Medal, and at the time of writing is also longlisted for the 2023 Margaret and Colin Roderick Literary Award. (Which is what prompted me to take it from the TBR and read it now).

Jock Serong is an author who came to my attention when he won a British award for writing On the Java Ridge (2017), a literary thriller that doesn't feature violence against women. His first two novels were crime novels i.e. Quota (2014) and The Rules of Backyard Cricket (2016) and The Settlement concludes his historical fiction series about the European settlement of Bass Strait. (In an interview with Corrie Perkins, he reveals that his next book is set in the C20th century enabling him to avoid the arrival of the internet.)

If you've been reading my reviews for a while, you might remember my review of Lyndall Ryan's Tasmanian Aborigines, A History since 1803 (2012) which I read in the year it was published. It is a landmark history of 400+ pages, not listed among other reference books used by Serong for his novel. Of these I have Truganini by Cassandra Pybus and Tongerlongeter by Nicholas Clements and Henry Reynolds. I haven't read them yet, and that's the point. Many of the stories that we need to know about our country will be more widely known if written as popular fiction than in weighty non-fiction texts, and that's fine IMO as long as the fiction is written with respect for the history, especially where it's contested.

Robinson's legacy is contested. Lyndall Ryan describes him as an ethnographer and humanist. As I wrote in my review:

Ryan is insistent on the point that whatever the tragic consequences of his attempts, this man was the first to try to learn about the Tasmanian Aborigines, and without him they would certainly have been exterminated, probably by 1835. His journals reveal just how hard the settlers tried to do just that.

The blurb's 'pastoral settlers' who were taking over Tasmanian lands were former soldiers. Ryan explains that they were veterans of the Napoleonic War. They were experienced at killing other people. Again, from my review of Tasmanian Aborigines...

When the wars ended, discontented returned officers and gentlemen who felt they were owed recompense for their war service were (like soldier-settlers after WW1 in Australia) fobbed off with grants of land in remote places. In both cases, that land granted to them was falsely held to be terra nullius, land belonging to no one. The Napoleonic veterans fared better than their WW1 counterparts, however, because their grants of land were accompanied by a convict labour-force. It was this massive invasion of pastoral settlers that effected the transformation of Tasmania from a creole small-scale agricultural society – with some accommodation between roughly equal numbers of indigenous people and the settlers – to a pastoral society. The colonial population surged from about 2000 to 23,500 by 1830. There was bound to be resistance, and there was.

I read The Settlement with these perspectives in the back of my mind.

To read the rest of my review please visit https://anzlitlovers.com/2023/07/23/the-settlement-furneaux-islands-trilogy-3-20... ( )