Unsettled

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What book are you reading right now?

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I’m reading Kate Grenville’s Unsettled: A Journey Through Time and Space at a moment when its questions feel especially close.

It’s an honest, steady book — the kind that doesn’t offer comfort, but clarity. Grenville looks at the challenges of the present and then turns to the past to understand the long shadows cast by the lives of her forebears. In this season, where conversations about identity, community, belonging, and justice keep circling around me, her voice sits beside me like someone who refuses to look away.

For generations, Australians have wrestled with the reality of our history with First Nations people. Grenville names what many avoid: that the land we now live on was taken, and that we have inherited the benefits of that taking. At the same time, we notice the rising tensions of our multicultural present — especially from those who feel their Anglo-Celtic heritage slipping from the centre to the margins. It’s a season of uncertainty for many, and those fears often find their way into political and cultural storms.

These are her questions, and they’re mine too:

• What do we do with the fact that we’re the beneficiaries of a violent past?
  We can’t change what has been done, but we also can’t pretend it has no claim on us.
• For non-Indigenous Australians, the question is no longer “What happened?” but “What do we do now that we know?”
• What does it mean to accept that our forebears were part of a relentless push across the continent — one that displaced people, cultures, livelihoods, and sometimes lives?
  We may not have committed the acts, but we live on the far side of their consequences.
• And when two groups of people want the same land — what does history tell us about how humans tend to behave?

None of this is light reading. It’s not meant to be. But in this season of life — thinking about community, character, belonging, and the future of the country we’re shaping — it feels like necessary reading.

Grenville doesn’t offer quick answers. She offers honest questions. And perhaps that’s what a good companion does in unsettled times: help us sit with what is hard to face, until we are brave enough to ask what kind of people we want to become.

If anyone has thoughts on where we go from here, I’d love to hear them. These questions are too large, too important, to hold alone.