Ironic Contradictions

11. A Book You Hated

I don't hate many books, but when I do...I hate them with a passion. I dislike The Road by Cormac McCarthy but not enough to hate it. One book I did hate however, was The Secret River. Mainly because I had to study it in high school for my VCE examinations and because I saw nothing in it but a reiteration of the simplest version of Australian history - the politicised idea of White settlers being evil and Aborigines being good. Now don't take me wrong, much of that did indeed happen - but what I hate is the oversimplification of such ideas. Because if there is one thing I think history shows and needs to show, it is that issues are never as simple as they are made out to be. There were many sensible men and women who hated what was going on, people who loved and even married into Aboriginal tribes. There were also racist Aborigine haters who loved nothing more than to kill them. And there were those who misunderstood the concept of land and thought that since they'd set up fences it was their land - a concept foreign to the Australian native people groups. So yes, I hated the oversimplification of such a controversial historical idea.