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In the novel The Secret River written by Kate Grenville and the film One Night the Moon directed by Rachel Perkins, the two authors explore similar ideas and share similar structural features to communicate these concepts. The Secret River is set in the early nineteenth century and is about a young couple William and Sal Thornhill who lived in London and started with nothing. Throughout their adventure William was sentenced to death and was excused from his sentence, being sent to Australia with his family where he built a life for them. One Night the Moon is a musical film set in the twentieth century where issues of racism and ownership of land, similar themes to those explored in The Secret River are evident.

The novel The Secret River elaborates on themes such as cultural differences, racism and ownership of land. Throughout the novel the main character William struggles with an internal battle of owning a piece of land, and this drives Thornhill until he gets the land he desires. This shares a similar structural feature to the movie One Night the Moon where Jim forbids the “Black Tracker “Albert to join the search on his land for his missing daughter Emily, stating “no blacks on my land”. Jim is ignorant and dismissive of Albert, worrying too much about his ‘pride’ rather than finding his daughter. In The Secret River racism also plays a large role in the storyline, with Smasher Sullivan being one of the racist, narcissistic and vulgar characters throughout the novel. This is evident when it is explained that he kept captive an aboriginal woman in his hut as a sex slave and collected aboriginal ears and wore them as tokens on his belt.

Stylistic features such as figurative language is common in both Grenville’s and Perki...

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...s body, after months of being missing and Rose sings “I didn’t want to know this, I didn’t want to see this”. However Grenville uses lots of dialogue in her novel to express the different ideas and features throughout her storyline. This is apparent when Kate uses descriptive stylistic features symbolising “a scatter of stars as meaningless as spilt rice” (pg.4). This creates a vivid image for the readers in what Kate was trying to suggest about the ‘uncommon’ stars in Australia.

Both authors also use different perspectives throughout their text, which is another structural difference. In the novel The Secret River Grenville narrates the story through William’s perspective. His thoughts, feelings and attitude all play through the mind of the reader, giving them insight on how and why he commits the acts he does.

Works Cited

The Secret River
One Night the Moon

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