Eleanor Dark seems for some time to have been relegated to the B-grade of Australian literary studies, though this could be an impression formed only within the changing-rooms of academe. If it is true, it must have something to do with her gender (early reviews have titles like ‘Good Novels by Women’) and with her living outside of central Sydney (Belinda McKay has an essay from the 2000s, ‘Writing from the Hinterland’, its attention to Dark’s ‘Queensland Years’ open to extension to include her Katoomba years). While Dark certainly actively engaged with other writer-critics, the later creation of her home as the Varuna ‘writer’s retreat’ indicates a remoteness from where the action is supposed to be. Politically, Dark seemed to leftists to be conservative and to conservatives she was suspected of holding communist views. The popular success of The Timeless Land shifted attention away from her literary experiments with modernist techniques, generated arguments over her mix of history and fiction, and allowed concerns about white representation of Aboriginal characters to push her work to one side. Perhaps class played a part too – an image of the comfortably-off wife of a doctor not ‘playing well’ to common Australian predilections for struggling artists wrestling with rural or worker experience. Whatever the reasons, Dark’s visibility and status as an Australian novelist has risen and fallen according to the fashions and frameworks of literary criticism and cultural politics in Australia.
In their introduction to the edited collection, Time, Tide and History: Eleanor Dark’s Fiction, Fiona Morrison and Brigid Rooney note Dark’s high reputation in the 1930s and 1940s (two ALS Gold Medals and reviews in the TLS and New York Times), and the ‘ebbing of the tide’ since then, with ‘sporadic’ attempts to re-appreciate her blend of ‘modernist style with romance plots’ (2). Their ‘first book-length collection of essays’ on Dark’s fiction (in the Sydney Studies in Australian Literature series) aims to ’track fluctuations in the reception … seeking to understand the factors at work, and to contextualise the shifts in her writing’ (3). Morrison and Rooney acknowledge the importance of feminism in changing critical attitudes to Dark, and this rests on 1980s reappraisals of women’s fiction by Susan Sheridan, Drusilla Modjeska, Helen Garner and others, following what Elizabeth Perkins noted in 1979 – ‘Quality Reprints’ of Australian novels. Barbara Brooks and Judith Clark published the first book-length biography of Eleanor Dark in 1998.
Morrison and Rooney identify the other major factor in reshaping Dark’s literary reputation: new assessment through the 2000s of Australian modernism that turned attention to Dark’s early writing, especially her ‘use of time shift and temporal compression [and] multifocal narration’ (4), culminating in new visibility as seen in Melinda J. Cooper’s monograph Middlebrow Modernism (2022), and prefigured in four doctoral theses on Dark, by Susan Carson, Marivic Wyndham, Helen O’Reilly and Meg Brayshaw.
Time, Tide and History suggests a fresh view of Dark, its cover featuring a cheerfully informal writer outdoors rather than the more familiar portrait of a brooding face indoors. The Introduction develops this impression by foregrounding Dark’s views on the links between individuals, history and community and pointing to influence of war on her outlook. New elements in commentary are the inclusion in the first section of a biography of husband Eric, and an assessment of the influence of Dark’s father, plus a later dialogue between two historians about the importance of Dark’s historical fiction. The editors also make the argument that if the historical trilogy overshadowed Dark’s other writing in the public mind, its own literary qualities were overlooked as feminism concentrated on the modernism of the early novels. Chapters discuss Dark’s vitalism (and its connection to eugenics and land) as well as affect in the fiction, melancholia being a salient aspect. At the same time, the title points to continuities of scholarly interest: modernism (time in the early novels), fluidity (gendered style, Waterway) and history (the Timeless Land trilogy). The book is organised into five parts: 1. Modernity and Biography; 2. Reading A Prelude to Christopher; 3. Modernist Ecopoetics, Vitalism and the Pastoral; 4. Reading The Timeless Land; 5. Writing at a Time of Crisis. The bulk of material sits in parts 2 and 4.
In the first section, Melinda J. Cooper notes the centrality of modern transport and communication systems in Dark’s fiction and finds the novelist’s enthusiasm for modern speed and the shrinking of world space waning as she confronts accidents, ongoing inequities under late colonial capitalism, and the erasure of local community. Here, the modernist technique of heterogenous ‘private time’ becomes part of a liberal humanist counter-assertion to modern standardisation. Margo Beasley’s biography of Eleanor’s doctor husband usefully shows the political connections of the Darks and the influence on the novels of Eric’s fondness for outdoor exercise. Cooper includes commentary on Lantana Lane, while Beasley pays some attention to Sun Across the Sky.
A Prelude to Christopher created Dark’s reputation as a serious literary writer and Morgan Burgess looks at that novel and Waterway to show how Eleanor carried over and critically modified ideas on women’s suffrage, marriage, and work promulgated by her father, Dowell O’Reilly. If, as Burgess says, ‘Dark highlights the heavy toll of reproduction and motherhood on women’s bodies’ (72), Anne Maxwell adds that Dark failed to separate ‘Motherhood and the Maternal Instinct’ from female gendering. Maxwell includes commentary on Slow Dawning and tracks how ideals of planned motherhood and a society improved by judicious choice of a marriage partner were brought into question as Nazi eugenics revealed negative implications. Alicia Gaffney records the distress of early reviewers of Prelude to Christopher, locating its disturbing attention to abnormal psychology in its study of Freudian melancholia (found also in the unpublished ‘Pilgrimage’) and in the inability to mourn the lost mother. Dark’s modernist elements are in some degree a textual performance of the symptoms of melancholia. Jessica Gildersleeve maps Gaffney’s observations on characters onto the ethos of modernity and the stress of living in an age of war. A ‘spiritual vertigo’ infects all characters, so that we can read the rational male idealist Nigel and his healthy nurse Kay as just as horrifically insane as neurotic Linda. This is one of the more striking sections of the book.
Section 3 turns from discussion of eugenics and the creation of a healthy modern nation to ‘ecopoetics’. Kathleen Davidson argues that Dark’s ‘mindscape’ blends observations of nature (and its degradation) with modernist interiority to blur the boundaries between nationalist realism and modernist experiment and between nature and culture. She illustrates her claims with a reading of Return to Coolami. A secondary point is that Dark shapes a ‘feminisation of ecological understandings’ (136) by making women characters more open to the world than men, who keep at a distance. In a longer, more ‘wide-angle’ chapter, Victoria Kuttainen turns from the penetration of landscape to Dark’s consistent interest in waterways. With comparisons to Vance Palmer’s The Passage and D.H. Lawrence’s vitalism, she ranges across Dark’s earlier novels, exploring her complicit critique of settler engagement with Aboriginal connection to land, and her ‘environmentally conscious and highly localised representations of place’ (147). Fiona Morrison takes up Kuttainen’s point about salvific and connecting water imagery, concentrating on Waterway and conflicting scales of local and global in which a quest for community (a ‘chorography’ of voices and movement across Sydney’s harbour) plays against a fear of the urban crowd and Australia’s idyllic isolation is threatened by impending world war. Morrison makes interesting points about the place of pastoral and elegy in Dark’s watery destabilising of ‘pastoralist priority’ (167). Accident, Indigenous haunting and the ‘magnificent indifference’ of nature disrupt any easy formation of (national) community.
Section 4 (Reading The Timeless Land) spends most of its time charting Dark’s unusual critique of colonialism’s rapacity and examines the various textual elements that show limitations to her vision. Tom Griffiths and Grace Karskens declare Dark’s influence on them as historians. They single out the trilogy’s ‘palpable materiality of time’, its ‘cinematic … story-telling’, its giving an ‘empty,’ ‘new’ land a populated history, and its nature writing ( 181–183, 190) as factors appealing to them. They note the importance of the Depression for Dark’s realisation of social failures but add that she did not register the Aboriginal protests manifest through that time and during the country’s sesquicentenary celebrations and note that she re-wrote history to make Bennelong into a tragic figure. On the other hand, Dark saw that convicts were not entirely brutalised victims, but rather part of the plan to create a settler colony. Philip Mead refers to the Kate Grenville–Inga Clendinnen argument over the place of historical fiction, and finds the trilogy showing up the kinds of stories being told about Australia and demonstrating some problems in the dominant fictive model of realism. Mead notes that although Dark imagines an Aboriginal view of colonial occupation, she cannot imagine an Aboriginal reader of her work and replaces Aboriginal story with a ‘wild white man’ trope, though ‘the idea of Aboriginal difference haunts … the project of realist narrative’ and the nation adopting it (219). Mead and Meg Brayshaw consider the figure of the road over the Blue Mountains as a sign of the progress of capitalist modernity and also of the ravages of that progress on Indigenes and nature. Thinking through the various modes of Anthropocene narrative (tragic, melancholic, covertly triumphal) as ways of managing temporal relations, Brayshaw sees Dark leaving the future open but also subscribing to a universalising humanism in which anthropocene narrative pushes aside considerations of Indigenous existence and enables a vision of settler connection to land that is infected by a melancholia of ‘death and repetition’ (234). Michael Griffiths again takes up Dark’s notions of time and timelessness, pointing to the land’s challenge to colonial hopes of smooth progress into modernity, but again pointing to how it is aligned with Aboriginality in a way that creates a ‘paradigm of appropriation’. White settlers intuit the land’s (Aboriginal) timelessness, thereby taking over a consciousness that allows the definition and continuation of settler culture. Griffiths finds agriculture to be means of holding together ‘the Aboriginal temporality located in the land and the merely abstract calendrical time that Johnny [Prentice] originally finds totally opaque.’ (245–6). Also looking at the Mannions and the Prentices, Brigid Rooney identifies Patrick Mannion as figuring Dark’s own critical complicity and awareness of the limits to benevolence. She argues that Dark infuses realist and modernist narrative with melodrama (pathos and the drive to just outcomes) to give an ‘affective charge that … tends to subvert ideological norms and discourses’. The text addresses its readers too, showing up how the author and they obey ‘an impulse to address, without fully knowing, the spectres that shadow and haunt its writing’ (257–258). Conor Mannion is a pivotal figure in holding together different times, classes: ‘her role in bringing comfort to others … through modest, selfless forms of listening and labour presents an alternative to disingenuous, self-serving benevolence’ (265). Dilboong, however, repeats the melodrama of Bennelong’s tragic demise, suggesting but also opening to question ‘the discourse of extinction’ applied to First Peoples as the concluding scenes of road building indicate both promise and threat.
In a concluding section, ‘Writing at a Time of Crisis’, Susan Carson reflects on the challenges to society presented by Covid lockdowns and looks back to The Little Company as a story of anxieties in wartime Australia, both external and internal, and of how ‘families, as well as communities, operate under pressure’ (275). Like Dark, characters struggle to find the physical and mental space to write and the balance between withdrawal from and intervention in public affairs. Gilbert Massey’s self-education in world affairs mirrors Eric Dark’s political writing during the 1940s and the novel’s worrying over writer’s block suggests the author’s frustrations at having to take part in wartime community support groups rather than being free to write, but also guilt at taking ‘time out’ to write when social activism and public education about the misuse of state power was an urgent need. Dark’s opposition to censorship and her inclusion of the Japanese submarines entering Sydney Harbour clashed with government controls during wartime that continued into the Cold War period. The novel echoes actual surveillance of the Darks by ASIO documented by Carson and reflects concern over the marginalising of women by all political groups. Carson closes with samples of the mixed reviews that contrast intellectual weight with compelling literary invention.
Most of the contributors cite earlier work (often by each other) making similar points, so the virtue of the collection lies more in its pulling together all the existing themes and opinions in Dark criticism than in producing new findings. Sometimes one feels that retrofitting contemporary critical concerns to pre-war fiction is unfair to its author, even if it does enable some nuanced insight to emerge. Points of interest for this reader are the importance of Dark’s mother’s story, the effect on the fiction of the Second World War, the connection to contemporary ‘climate fiction’, and the brief comparisons with Woolf, Mansfield and Rhys that suggest further transnational studies.
No book these days can be an economic proposition for the publisher or the reader beyond a certain length. Therefore, no critical study can cover every possible aspect of a writer’s production. Critics can be grateful, in that this leaves room for future studies. Time, Tide and History points beyond itself to work by Paul Giles, Brenton Doecke, Tony Simoes da Silva, Tom Griffiths and others. Doecke’s 1990s article suggests a critical (re)turn to studies of realism foreshadowed here by Mead and Rooney. As the Introduction acknowledges, the trilogy’s attempt to imagine an Aboriginal view of white incursion opens up an expectation of new readings from Aboriginal scholars. We might look for future work on Dark’s poetry and magazine short stories. Lantana Lane is touched on here and there, and Sun Across the Sky is mentioned, but these and Slow Dawning perhaps warrant further study. Acknowledging the work of Gilfind, Carter and Osborne, I think there’s probably more ‘book history’ work to be done on Dark’s dealings with periodicals and publishers. The editors’ preface mentions the book’s origins in a planned conference. This may have shaped who could attend and thus contribute, but one wonders what might be added in a subsequent collection by online outreach to overseas scholars. In the meantime, Time, Tide and History gives us plenty to mull over and does excellent work in highlighting the value of Eleanor Dark’s novels as both technical and intellectual contributions of continuing interest.