It is a pleasure and an enormous challenge to be adapting Kate Grenville's The Secret River. She has written a story about a dark and tragic part of our history; a history that Australia is still coming to terms with.

As is the case with most novels the author takes us inside her characters' heads. And through this she illuminates a deeper understanding of what happened and of how her central characters, William and Sal Thornhill, brutalized by the poverty and deprivation of early nineteenth century England, made sense of the unfamiliar world they encountered. William comes to see the potential of a new life here whilst Sal holds fast to the dream of returning home. This is a common theme through the history of migration; a tearing of the heart between the need to stay and the yearning to return. But the central moral question at play is what price is William Thornhill prepared to pay for this new life.

The great challenge of the adaptation is how to make the internal world of the characters external; how to make it exist and felt within dramatic action. How to bring the complexity of the character's rich internal lives, as they are described so beautifully in the book to life on the stage because unlike a novel on the stage we cannot be inside a character's head.

Kate also gives us a portrait of the Dharug people and the landscape of the Hawkesbury River or Dhirrumbin as the Dharug call it. But this portrait is observed at a distance, through the eyes of the European characters. It is impossible to maintain this distance in the stage version. The adaptation must bring us closer to these people and render them in all their dimensions as human beings, as characters as rich and complex as the white characters in the story. Unlike in the novel they will speak and we will hear their words. But what words will we hear? The Dharug language still exists and we will draw on it for our production. But this is the greatest challenge for all white storytellers in this country - how do we make sense of what indigenous peoples thought and felt about the arrival of Europeans in this country.  We can only be lead by contemporary aboriginal people who with great generosity show us the way back so that we may begin to reconcile with this past.

For me the theatre is a place to tell the important stories about who we are. The Secret River is one of those stories.

The Secret River, Sydney Theatre, 12 January - 9 February, 2013.