William Dawes was an officer of the Royal Marines, and sailed with the First Fleet from England to Australia in 1788, landing in the province of New South Wales He was by profession an astronomer but he wanted to join the voyage in order to study the indigenous people of the region. Kate Grenville's novel, The Lieutenant, is loosely based on Dawes' experiences that he had chronicled in his notebooks, which Grenville used as her source for the narrative. Dawes uses the documented conversations between Dawes and a young girl who explains Aboriginal life to him to show how two people who have absolutely nothing in common can nonetheless become friends and develop a relationship based on mutual respect and an openness to learning about each other's culture.
Before penning The Lieutenant, Grenville had published another historical novel, The Secret River, a fiction based on the story of one of Grenville's own ancestors, who had been a convict sent from Britain to be repatriated in Australia, which was then a penal colony. Although Grenville does not consider The Lieutenant to be a sequel to The Secret River, she does consider them to be inter-related, mirror images of each other, presenting the same set of circumstances from both sides.
Given that Grenville had been shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize for The Secret River, it was to be expected that her next book would be eagerly anticipated. The Lieutenant was well-received by critics and by the public, and was shortlisted for a number of literary awards, including the Queensland Premier's Literary Award.
