The Country Schoolmaster by Kate Grenville review – when finding the truth is ‘like grabbing at water’
The prize-winning author returns to Australia’s colonial archives to reflect on our thirst for answers. But like her source material, the results are slipperyGet our weekend culture and lifestyle emailIn 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, C
Imogen DeweyKate GrenvilleBooks