Joan Makes History

Feminist rewritings of history are usually the kind of thing that brings me out in hives, but I gave this a go on the strength of the excellent The Secret River. Joan proves to be an exuberant, senual and engaging narrator, both when she lives the life of a “normal” wife and mother, and when she materialises in various roles at important moments in Australian history.

It was only when she adopts the role of a man for a while that I realised I was reading a take on Woolf’s Orlando.

Good stuff.

I read Joan Makes History for our Australia Day which marks the first British settlement at Sydney Cove on January 26, 1788. Kate Grenville wrote her debut novel as a playful exploration of Australia's history with the eponymous Joan always near centre stage.

There are many Joans throughout this book; Joan, the photographer's assistant who takes the likeness of Ned Kelly, Joan, the part Aboriginal who swaps tall stories with Herman Melville, Joan, the swaggie's wife immortalised in Frederick McCubbin's On the Wallaby Track. There are many Joans, heroic and bawdy and heart breaking.

Australia Day's Joan is the female convict who unbeknownst to conventional history, is first to land at Sydney Cove and later restrained between two show more soldiers, witnesses the first planting of the British flag on Australian sand.

Grenville makes a comic dig at the history writers who ignored the women, the migrants, the domestic workers and the Aboriginal people who were all part of the making of Australia of today. Lots of fun. show less

I started reading it, but didn't find it as interesting as I expected, so I'm going to pass it on unfinished.

Kate Grenville is Australia's Jane Austen / Margaret Atwood. Our greatest novelist ever (as far as I'm concerned)