Searching for the Secret River has just been released, according to the University of Sydney's Web site.

Kate Grenville wrote the award-winning novel The Secret River and this non-fiction sequel "in her room in the University's Woolley Building as Honorary Associate in the English Department".

It traces her trawl though the original sources and sets quotations from the historical records against the fictionalised scenes they've become. It follows her field research, her bouts of camping in the bush, her attempts to make a slush lamp, her expedition to Kununurra where she met some "very powerful, stern, knowledgeable old men".

Louise Maral from the publications group at the university interviewed Grenville for the story.

But the thanks Grenville has received from members of the Aboriginal community is worth more to her, she said, than any of the prizes.

"They recognise that the book is my act of acknowledgement, my way of saying: this is how I'm sorry."