In telling the story of her settler ancestors, the Salt Creek author knew she was on controversial ground. Two years and much praise later, she still feels torn

“Dearest Minnie, I have had such a time. Let me tell you …”

When Lucy Treloar came across the only surviving letter written by her distant relation Emily Hack, it was as if her ancestor was “grabbing [her] by the shoulders and saying: ‘You will not believe what has happened to me.’” The story of her relatives’ ill-starred attempt to set up a farm in South Australia’s Coorong region had always been family legend, but Treloar says her great-great-great-aunt’s 1858 account of her miserable journey down from Adelaide – the wind, sand and flies compounding her despair at finding herself on a remote farm – was electrifying: “I found the voice of that letter incredibly compelling.”

She’d driven past the area hundreds of times on the journey between home in Melbourne and her family’s beach house near Adelaide – her mother pointing out the window at the rolling saltbush where her ancestors once struggled – but Treloar had never visited the Coorong. She had half an idea to write a novel about her wild and wilful great-great-grandmother Annie, so when a relative suggested a trip there to look into their shared history, she leaped at the chance. Paddling in a kayak through that “grand, resonant, melancholy landscape”, in lagoons poisoned by salt after the extraction of water from rivers upstream, was “like a spark”, Treloar says. “I wrote frantically the minute we got back to the car, just to record various things I’d felt. The plot just started erupting from that moment.”

I wrote frantically the minute we got back to the car. The plot just started erupting from that moment

There may have never been a Salt Creek Station, as Treloar carefully explains in her author’s note, but while creating her determined 15-year-old narrator, Hester Finch, the writer mined her family’s unfortunate farming venture for narrative gold. Hester’s father may owe more to Captain Ahab than John Barton Hack, but the Finches and Treloar’s ancestors share the same abolitionist background and lose multiple flocks of sheep to shipwrecks. One tragic scene, in which a woman dies in childbirth while being rowed across the Coorong lagoon, was the fate of Emily’s mother.

But the discovery that intrigued Treloar most was that a mixed-race Indigenous boy had once lived with the Hacks on the family farm. If the boy’s mother was white, the author asked herself, who was she?

Facebook Twitter Pinterest An 1846 engraving of a scene on the Coorong, near Lake Albert. Photograph: National Library of Australia

When Tully appears on the Finches’ farm in the novel, Hester’s father takes him on as part of his project to “civilise” the region, allowing him to study alongside his own children in the hope the boy will improve relations between white settlers and the Indigenous Australians they have displaced. But as Tully is pulled ever further into the family’s orbit, the contradictions of this arrangement are exposed.

As Treloar’s research broadened out from her family history, she began to understand the insurmountable barriers that Indigenous people faced in the 19th-century, and the racism they endured despite some of their attempts to work with colonial thinking. “They sent their children to school, they worked incredibly hard, they earned money, they saved, they applied for land grants – and they were knocked back over and over again,” she says. “Despite all of that, the thing they didn’t have was the right colour of skin.”

Race and belonging are such controversial subjects in Australia today that Treloar says it’s “immensely complicated even to contemplate writing about this stuff”. Bodies such as the Australian Council for the Arts have protocols for writers to follow when tackling Indigenous issues: for example, non-Indigenous writers “should consult and seek consent where use of Indigenous cultural material and histories are made fictional”; “identify relevant people with whom to discuss the intended publication”; and “understand that the consultation process may be lengthy … Indigenous individuals and communities should have the final approval on how the written form of their cultural material is presented.”

Treloar initially wanted to include a strand of nonfiction in her novel about the Ngarrindjeri, the Indigenous peoples of the Coorong and surrounding areas. When she wrote to tribal leaders to suggest this project, the author says they responded with enthusiasm and asked for a process of negotiation and final approval over the manuscript as outlined in the ACA guidelines. But her publisher told her not to sign anything, she explains, “because of the precedent” it would set.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Settlers John Barton Hack and Emily Hack, circa 1870. Photograph: B-77593 / State Library of South Australia

After returning to the Coorong, spending time with Indigenous people and learning more about Ngarrindjeri culture, Treloar became convinced her that it wasn’t her story to tell, so she focused on Hester’s perspective instead. “One of the big advantages of a first-person narrator, especially a woman,” she says, “is that there’s a limit to how much they can see. So the questions I was always asking myself were: ‘What would this character have seen? What would she have noticed about these people? What would she have thought or felt watching them?’ And that allowed me not to go too close to Indigenous culture, while maintaining truth.”

Wanting to write about Indigenous history well, but being afraid of causing offence, was “dreadfully, dreadfully difficult”, Treloar says. “I felt filled with conflict the whole time and worried whether I was re-enacting that cultural thing which I was also critiquing, that idea that I could just march in and do what I wanted.”

Two years after the novel was first published in Australia, despite positive responses from Indigenous groups and a Miles Franklin award shortlisting, Treloar says she still feels torn. But she’s clear that writing Salt Creek wasn’t a brave decision.

“Bravery sounds kind of grand and admirable,” she says. “I think there’s something more like stubbornness. I just thought: ‘This is the book I have to write and I have to write it until it’s finished and I’m going to write it.’ Even though I felt dreadful for quite a bit of it, dreadfully anxious about how it might be received, I was still determined to get it done and to face whatever music might come my way.”