They manage to adapt to life in the penal colony where William once again works as a waterman. With them are their son Willie and a second child born during their passage that they name Dick. When William is sentenced to death for his attempt to steal wood, Sal is able to have the sentence changed to deportation and they are sent to Australia. William finds employment with another master, but does not earn enough on which to live and turns to stealing. Poverty stricken, William and Sal lose the family home and all of the boats to the authorities. Savings quickly dwindle and Middleton and his wife both die from an illness. An extended cold spell freezes the river and puts him out of work. He is happy to have left the poverty of his past behind him but that feeling of security does not last long. He continues to work the river using a boat that was a wedding gift from his former master. As he nears the end of his apprenticeship, Thornhill falls in love with Middleton’s daughter Sal they marry on the day he is free. He comes to resent the superior attitudes of the well-to-do and works hard to raise his lot in life. Middleton and spent seven years helping transport the upper class across the Thames River. He was apprenticed to a waterman named Mr. A flashback shows the early life of Thornhill in London. The European convicts are not permitted to leave, the Aboriginals are spiritually part of the land and do not desire to leave. Two very different groups are occupying the same land. When the man approaches Thornhill, seemingly out of nowhere, Thornhill tells him to, “Be off!” The native simply repeats his words back to him symbolically setting in motion the central conflict of the novel. His first night in a convict settlement in Sydney includes his first encounter with an Aboriginal. Instead of being executed, however, he and his family are sent to New South Wales in Australia. In 1806, he is convicted of stealing wood and sentenced to death. William Thornhill was born into poverty, leading to a life of crime in the slums of London. In Searching for the Secret River, she tells of doing the research for the first book and of how that book was initially conceived as a biographical work about a familial ancestor Solomon Wiseman. In 2006, Grenville published a work of nonfiction as a follow-up to The Secret River.
The story examines the colonization of the land of the Aborigines by the Europeans. In Kate Grenville’s 2005 novel The Secret River, William Thornhill is a nineteenth-century Englishman who, facing a death sentence for theft, is sent to Australia instead.
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