earticle

영어

This paper explores how the counter-memory narratives in Kate Grenville’s Sarah Thornhill question and disrupt Australian cultural memory. Whereas Australia’s mainstream cultural memories represent ‘what we should be,’ Grenville’s counter-memory divulges the falsehood of the official memory and identifies ‘what we really are.’ Sarah Thornhill grows up not knowing anything of what her father William Thornhill did to Aborigines for the sake of taking up the land which she called home. Later on Sarah finds out the secret of her father and all the stories made up on William Thornhill’s wealth. Nevertheless, she admits that she is herself implicated in father’s guilt because she is one of the beneficiaries of the wrongdoings of the traumatic past, even though her counter-memories break the continuity of family’s glory. The novel also deals with the issue of ‘The Stolen Generation’ that was produced by Australian Founding Fathers. Sarah is asked to visit Māori in New Zealand to present a eulogy at Rugig’s wake. Her counter-memory remembers ‘against the grain’ that she did not protect Rugig and sat on the sidelines of the abuse. Finally Sarah’s shame moves her to make an apology through which she asks readers to remember responsible memories of the traumatic past.