Margaret Atwood in a lecture some years ago speculated on why so many novels about history were being written in her home country of Canada. She remarked: "by taking a long hard look backwards, we place ourselves" (Atwood 1997). Indeed, over the last few decades more and more Australian novelists have written what can broadly be defined as 'historical novels'. The practise of writing fiction to explore the past appears to be part of a growing cultural desire—the search for identity within

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... y and through the avenue of the novel. However, there still seems to be an overall ambivalence about the kind of knowledge these types of works produce. This ambivalence is expressed predominantly in the literature surrounding historical novels, as well as in the comments historians, novelists and public commentators have made. In an attempt to establish the historical novel's contribution to knowledge this thesis will undertake a textual analysis of two influential and prize-winning works—Kate Grenville's The Secret River and Richard Flanagan's Gould's Book of Fish. In my analysis, I will demonstrate how these novelists contribute to our understanding of history in two distinct ways. Firstly, by establishing an imagined connection with those who were victims of colonial violence via the bodily and worlding aspects of literature; and secondly, by using fiction as an "historical methodology" (Pinto 2010). Looking at the historical novel in an Australian setting, this thesis will demonstrate how certain novels that emerged from the History Wars offer genuine insights into the realities of British Colonisation and frontier violence helping expand our capacity for understanding. This thesis also comprises of a creative work titled Glossolalia, a novel about the notorious Reverend William Bedford (1781-1852). Bedford was sent by the Church of England to minister to the convict population of Van Diemen's Land. Nearly two centuries later, his forebear, a twenty-something Creative Writing PhD student, searches for the truth about [...]