LYN DICKENS Salt Upon the Water. Reviewed by Ann Skea

Lyn Dickens’s award-winning debut novel of an independent woman in colonial South Australia explores prejudice, power and identity.

Salt Upon the Water is an historical fiction; also, according to the blurb on the back cover, ‘an epic love story’. Both are true, but this is not a conventional romantic novel. Rather, it is an exploration of identity – of what makes and shapes a person’s character – and also a well-researched vision of the first few Europeans to settle on the coast of South Australia, at a time when whaling ships still visited the coast, the land was still un-surveyed and the plans for a free-settlers’ colony were still new.

In October 1836, Clarissa Lucia Fitzroy is on an American whaling ship off the coast of Kangaroo Island. The weather is stormy and a freak wave washes her from a slippery deck into the sea. She thinks ‘of the Devon coastline and the mermaid sign over the village tavern’, and of the ‘half-fish princess of the Laccadive Sea’, and she remembers the stories of selkies her Scottish governess had told her: stories of

strange women in fur pelts who could transform between woman and seal … That was what selkie mothers did. They left their half-human children, took up their darkened sealskins and slipped away.

Clarissa, too, is a double creature, half English, half Hindu, and her own mother suddenly disappeared when Clarissa and her brother were children. She spent her early childhood with her parents in Calcutta, among ‘the scent of dried patchouli and mangoes going to seed’, but this ends abruptly when her father dies and two friendly strangers come to take her and her older brother to the estate of her grandfather, Sir Charles Fitzroy, in England.

‘What about my mother?’ I asked the lady …

‘Now don’t you worry about her,’ the lady says. ‘Don’t you worry about a thing.’

Clarissa is a fictional character, but William Light, the second main character in Salt Upon the Water, is not. He was the first Surveyor General of South Australia and laid out the plans for the city of Adelaide. He, like Clarissa, is of mixed-race heritage. His father, Francis Light, while employed in Malaysia by the East India Company, had negotiated an agreement with the Sultan of Kedah by which he became governor of Palu-Penang. He cleared the land, changed its name to Prince of Wales Island, and established Georgetown. His wife, William’s mother, Martina Rozells, was the granddaughter of the Sultan. She was a princess of ‘Siam, Chinese Malay and perhaps Portuguese heritage’, and it was she who had arranged this negotiation.

Will inherited his father’s estate in Penang but was sent to England at the age of six, and did not see his mother again until, as an adult, he attended the wedding of one of his sisters in India. In Salt Upon the Water there is some secret about his mother’s life after his father’s death, and his older sisters, who all live in India, now claim not to be able to remember a word of Malay, in spite of having grown up speaking it. They will not discuss their mother with him.

Both Clarissa and Will belong to two worlds. Both are very familiar with the way others see and respond to their different complexions and histories, especially those in polite English society and, in particular for Will, in the East India Company. Clarissa, who was trained by her father to forget the name her mother gave her – Indamuti – remembers being been called a ‘stunning mulatto’ by one young English gentleman, or ‘perhaps you’re an octoroon’. She watches, from her grandfather’s estate, as other young women go out into the world to be presented and attend balls, while she

had Rousseau and logic. Brisk walks and shooting. ‘I could load and clean a flintlock before I knew how to waltz.’

But she has books (although there is outrage when she chooses to read them), and she has wit and determination.

Will, whose features are more Eastern and whose skin is darker than hers, knows well the experience of rejection. As an officer from the East India Company tells him bluntly, he is not descended from two European parents; his parents’ marriage ‘according to the local custom of [his] mother’s people’ is considered ‘invalid’, so his ‘lack of legitimacy is not convenient’; and his mother never took his father’s name:

 ‘A shocking custom. A family cannot be united when a mother does such a thing.’

 ‘There’s is no blending in for us,’ Will tells Clarissa when they first meet. Initially, their differences unite them; ultimately they are the cause of their separation.

Clarissa is not yet 21 when she meets Major William Light by accident (literally) at the Vauxhall Pleasure Gardens. She, thrilled by the experience of a hot-air balloon flight, dreams of freedom:

the world spins away and there are no cousins, no pleasure-seekers, no relatives. Just the uncertainty of the shifting air … How is it that I can fly, that I can be here among the clouds and still not free?

Will is more interested in the balloon:

How would one make a balloon to carry a man. Could he do it. He could do it … What must it be like to explore the great expanse of air. He has navigated the waves and charted the land, but this last frontier is still foreign to him.

Clarissa draws him away from her watchful cousin and tutor to quiet places away from the crowds, but they soon have to return. After this, they continue to meet. When her grandfather dies and she becomes a wealthy heiress with more freedom, they go to Europe together. Her later memories of this are of pleasure and delight. She refuses Will’s suggestion that they should marry, wanting to remain independent, but when something happens in Venice, their relationship sours and Will leaves her. Clarissa has never really understood his reasons.

Now, 14 years later, Clarissa has arrived in Australia to find Colonel William Light, who is surveying the South Australian coast in preparation for the new colony. She has been told that he knows where her mother might be, and she is determined to find her.

The whalers set up thin tents on the coast where a few Europeans are already living and harvesting seal-skins. Many of these sealers are convicts and deserters who have escaped from the convict settlement on Van Diemen’s Land and they are dangerous and unpredictable, but the whalers protect Clarissa, who has paid for their most recent expedition. The arrival of the Will’s ship, the Resolute, brings Clarissa and Will back together but their meetings at the whalers’ tent-encampment, soured as they are by past secrets, are strained, brief and constantly interrupted by ongoing events. Clarissa is infuriated by Will’s reluctance to tell her what he knows about her mother; Will feels he needs to protect her from the bad things said to have happened and from his own secret – something he did after meeting her mother in the Bow Bazaar area of Calcutta.

When the Cygnet, a ship full of new settlers, arrives unexpectedly, there is an ugly dispute with the American whalers over fishing rights. At the same time, unpleasant information about Clarissa is circulated and she becomes vulnerable.

As history, Salt Upon the Water creates a realistic picture of the very earliest days of colonial South Australia. Will, as an idealist, is determined to make this new Australian state a better place for settlers and the Indigenous people than the corrupt and violent convict states. Historically, William Light is known to have had good relations with the Indigenous owners of the land he was surveying, but, as the First Mate of the whaling ship tells Clarissa in Salt Upon the Water, this had not always been the case with other arrivals in the past, and his own parents and grandparents, who were Aboriginal, had suffered terribly from men who raided their land. Clarissa has seen, too, the horrors perpetrated against Indigenous women on Kangaroo Island. She challenges Will over his belief:

‘This place, the things that have happened here. You say that it will get better, that things will change –’

‘This is a colony, not an enclave of escaped thugs.’

‘Is it really so different? What about the people here? … Your men have been here but a few months, and already they treat the natives with disgust. I don’t understand what you are doing here or what you hope to achieve. How long do you think your ideals will last? You are just one man.’

‘Do you think so little of me? I have a chance to make a difference here, Clarissa. I may be just one man but the settlers listen to me … My ideals mean something.’

In Salt Upon the Water, the themes of prejudice, power and identity underlie the story of Clarissa and Will. The awkward growth of their new relationship is shadowed by Will’s illness and increasing debility, but their memories of earlier times are rich and happy, as well as painful. Clarissa’s responses, as secrets are slowly revealed, are natural and believable, as, too, are her actions and the eventual outcome of her search.

Lynn Dickens’s writing is fluent and often poetic. She captures the characters of Clarissa and Will and their interactions beautifully, and she captures, too, the unrest, the dangers, and the rough nature of the early beginnings of the first small free-settlement that would grow into the now-thriving state of South Australia.

As a debut novel, Salt Upon the Water is distinctive, imaginative, carefully researched and very enjoyable. It was awarded the Arts South Australia Wakefield Press Unpublished Manuscript Award in 2024.

Lyn Dickens Salt Upon the Water Wakefield Press 2025 PB 268pp $32.99

Dr Ann Skea is a freelance reviewer, writer and an independent scholar of the work of Ted Hughes. She is author of Ted Hughes: The Poetic Quest (UNE 1994, and currently available for free download here). Her work is internationally published and her Ted Hughes webpages (ann.skea.com) are archived by the British Library.

You can buy Salt Upon the Water from Abbey’s at a 10% discount by quoting the promotion code NEWTOWNREVIEW.

You can also check if it is available from Newtown Library.

Tags: Australian fiction, Australian writers, award-winning author, colonial South Australia, free settlers, historical fiction, Indigenous Australians, Lyn | Dickens, racism, sealers, whalers, William Light