ROBERT HORNE: interviewed by Ben Ford Smith
Ben Ford Smith talks to the author of The Glass Harpoon about being longlisted for this year’s ARA Historical Novel Prize and South Australia’s history.
After its inaugural year in 2020, the ARA Historical Novel Prize is already Australasia’s richest genre award. Robert Horne’s novel The Glass Harpoon (reviewed here) has been longlisted with eight others for the 2021 prize.
Ben Ford Smith: The Glass Harpoon was published by a small press with a small marketing budget. It must be validating that it has emerged to contend with the likes of Kate Grenville and Gail Jones.
Robert Horne: It is. Longlisting for the ARA prize has already given my novel terrific attention that I wouldn’t have otherwise got. The novel hasn’t penetrated the nation-wide bookshop market yet, but hopefully that will come. This is only the second year of the award and it’s giving quality fiction from boutique publishers the opportunity to be judged alongside books from houses with national distribution networks.
BFS: Your book weaves together accounts of Aboriginal and European interactions, including both historical and fictional characters, against the backdrop of the settling of South Australia. At the centre is the ‘shooting party’, in which settlers would murder Aboriginal groups. I imagine a lot of people hadn’t heard of this before reading your book.
RH: This had been in my mind since the ’90s when I was having a drink at a Rundle Street hotel with a bloke from one of the settler families. The story handed down was that the men would come around Sunday morning while the women were dressing up a sheep for the oven. They would ride up to a blacks’ camp and just blast them, chuck them in a dry creek bed, then ride home with their souvenirs. The women would have the roast hogget, that’s what he called it, ready for Sunday lunch. They treated it as sport, although some of them must have had darker feelings. My hero Matthew Larkin is pitch-forked into this situation.
BFS: It seems such stories have only been accessible through oral transmission; Paul Sendziuk and Robert Foster’s 2018 A History of South Australia was the first written history to acknowledge such systematic killings. What about the Kaurna people?
RH: Years later when I got to know Uncle Lewis O’Brien, I asked him if there were such oral histories in the Kaurna circles. He said, straightaway, ‘Yes!’ It’s always been accepted by the Kaurna. In one family history I read it was said that originally there were 500 Aboriginals in a settled area and five years later there were none. Where did they go? In the records and memoirs there are always memoirs of ‘troublesome natives’ and sheep being speared and this happened for four or five years in any given region. Then without any given explanation those stories just stop.
BFS: The existence of these parties is only recently becoming public knowledge. Have you encountered much reluctance to accept this aspect of our history?
RH: These true stories of early South Australia have been cut out of our official histories for a long time and there are a lot of people at grassroots level who are very interested in seeing justice done by telling the truth. On the other hand, there are still plenty who I think feel they should protect the reputations of the old families. Conservative news outlets here in South Australia have been wary of giving the book exposure. So there is still reluctance in some quarters to deal with this issue. But there is a strong groundswell of people who want this all to come out. I think there will be people around the world, particularly perhaps in countries with frontier cultures, who will be interested in these issues too.
BFS: Lucy Bray, the governor’s niece, is one of the most pronounced characters in your novel. She’s outspoken and hungry for adventure. Was she based on a real person?
RH: No, but Lucy represents the women for which SA became famous—SA was the first state to give women the vote—from the monied and educated group that was the dominant social class here. For example, Mary Thomas was a published poet when she left England and here she became a prolific diarist and deeply involved in public affairs. Catherine Helen Spence wrote the first Australian novel written by a woman.
BFS: There is tension in your novel between characters who want to help the Aboriginal populations and those who don’t care—maybe it’s not deliberately cruel, more that they were an obstacle to profit.
RH: Before the time my novel is set, the Whig party had taken government from the Tories so they were more progressive. The colonial secretary, Lord Glenelg, wouldn’t allow the colony to go ahead until there was protection, until the Aboriginals were made citizens at least. There was also meant to be a certain amount of land set aside for them. But after the Tories took power again in England, the plan was shelved. The profiteers were going around with a spring in their step and the Protector of Aborigines in Adelaide was working alone, two days’ ride from the mid-north where parts of my novel are set. A modern analogy would be having the Greens organising a colony hand in hand with an opposing crowd from the Nationals.
BFS: You mentioned having first thought about these ideas back in the 1990s. What prompted you to finally write the book over twenty years later?
RH: When I started doing reviews in 2010, my first book was Ochre and Rust by Philip Jones of the South Australia Museum. Twelve chapters that start with an item from first contact settler history. There was a Kaurna shield for one chapter and from that starting point he brought in eyewitness accounts from early settlers. There was an account of an affray between the Kaurna people and a visiting mob from the River Murray. One was a ceremonial affair, and another where they got serious. They were fighting over access to the white man; the river people wanted glass and tomahawks, even shaves and tobacco were coveted. I went around for about three months thinking, ‘This is incredible material, someone should write a novel about it.’ Eventually the penny dropped.
The shortlist for the ARA Historical Novel Prize will be announced tomorrow, Wednesday 22 September 2021, and the winner will be announced on 22 October 2021 at the HNSA biennial conference. You can read more about the prize and the longlisted books here.
Robert Horne The Glass Harpoon Ginninderra Press 2020 PB 250pp $37.50
Ben Ford Smith is the co-author of Drugs, Guns & Lies (2020, Allen & Unwin). He holds a PhD in creative writing from Flinders University, South Australia.
You can buy The Glass Harpoon from Abbeys at a 10% discount by quoting the promotion code NEWTOWNREVIEW here or from Booktopia here.
To see if it is available from Newtown Library, click here.
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