Unsettled: An evening with Kate Grenville

We are delighted to welcome Kate Grenville to The Phee Broadway Theatre for a conversation with Astrid Edwards about her new book, Unsettled: A journey through time and place.

Kate Grenville is one of Australia’s most celebrated writers and in this most recent book, she asks the question: ‘What does it mean to be on land that was taken from other people? Now that we know how the taking was done, what do we do with that knowledge?’

Kate Grenville is no stranger to the past. Her success and fame as a writer exploded when she published The Secret River in 2005, a bestseller based on the story of her convict ancestor, an early settler on the Hawkesbury River.

More than two decades on, and following the defeat of the Voice referendum, she is still grappling with what it means to descend from people who were, as she puts it, “on the sharp edge of the moving blade that was colonisation”.

​Kate Grenville goes on a kind of pilgrimage, back through the places her family stories happened, and put the stories and the First People back into the same frame, on the same country, to try to think about those questions.

This gripping book – which gives many of us pause for thought - is the result of that journey.