While not overly impressed with Barbara Brooks and Judith Clark’s biography of Eleanor Dark (blog post, 15 May 2022) it did inspire me to read her work. I decided to make a start with Waterway, her 1938 novel set in contemporary Sydney. Unfortunately, when I searched the local library catalogue they didn’t have a copy, there was one at Gundagai but our library had suspended inter-library loans while they did a stock take or a review or performed some mysterious process which has affected ties with other libraries and services to readers across the Riverina region. The local paper claims that the mobile library service which used a very flash truck and trailer arrangement worth about $27K and visited 21 locations across over 50,000 square kilometres has ceased to operate, a very sad situation that I hope will be rectified soon. But I digress, Waterway seems to be out of print so I made a mega commitment and downloaded the approx. 600 page The Timeless Land to my Kindle instead. I am agnostic about eBooks vs ‘real’ books. One advantage of a Kindle is that you can delude yourself that you are well into a doorstop-sized tome (even when the little percentage thingy says otherwise) and it is a lot lighter to carry around than a book of The Timeless Land’s bulk. Of course, marginalia are a problem and if this was a book group choice I would be woefully ill-prepared for our discussion.
The Riverina's Mercedes Benz Mobile Library truck & trailer whose fate is currently in the balance. Source Riverina Library Services Facebook page.
Anyway
thanks to a bout of the flu, I‘ve finished reading The Timeless Land and feel sufficiently impressed by Dark’s
achievement to want to make a few comments about the book. I am not alone as Googling revealed hundreds
of reviews from the most academic analyses of its literary form and cultural
perspective to succinct ‘this was a good read’ type comments. My blog isn’t the place to rehash all these
as they are easily found and I do hope to be reasonably engaging. Here are just
some my reactions to reading Eleanor Dark’s The Timeless Land …
Dark conveys
the physical aspects of Australia, the sky, landscape, vegetation etc. with an
authenticity that reflects many hours spent observing and forming a deep love of and respect for this country. Those also inform the passion and conviction
with which she writes about the Indigenous way of life and spiritualty. While
primarily an imaginative exercise for her, albeit a highly researched one,
which today would likely be regarded as appropriation and distortion, her
decision to foreground Aboriginal experience in this novel - it opens with
Bennilong (sic) and his father watching the tall ships of the First Fleet arrive
- was a bold and radical departure from the colonial narrative of ‘settlement’
that abounded in the 1940s when she wrote.
Achieving this is testament to her deeply held liberal humanist values,
to her painstaking and unflinching use of her sources and her considerable
talent as a writer.
The text
abounds with the quite correct, but jarring
to the modern reader, use of ‘one’, the gender neutral indefinite/impersonal
pronoun, when Dark is crafting the inner monologues of her characters be they
naval officers, convicts or Indigenous Australians. This consistent usage, while understandable
from the pen of a writer of her background and era, evokes an upper middle class aloofness that doesn’t
accord well with the varied kinds of human consciousness she is attempting to
conjure. Having said that, her language suffers from very few archaisms and
most of the time is admirably successful in persuading us that we are seeing
18thC existence through the eyes of her characters. Her sweeps of descriptive
writing and her intricate construction of their trains of thought, particularly Bennilong’s and Arthur Phillip’s, are a triumph.
Not all the
characters are so convincingly drawn but one (I mean, I) certainly developed a
soft spot for Watkin Tench whose 1788: Comprising A Narrative of the Expedition to Botany Bay
and A Complete Account of the Settlement at Port Jackson was the source of much of Dark’s material and whose reputed sophistication and sense of the absurd she
captures beautifully, providing the novel with some of its few lighter hearted
moments.
As well as
the centrality of the Aboriginal narrative, Dark focuses on several aspects of gender
relations, both Cunnembeillee and Ellen are forced into socially condoned
sexual and domestic subservience and newly arrived free and convict women are
treated as currency. However, in her desire to contrast cooperative, intuitive
Aboriginal Law with hierarchical colonial ‘justice’ she perhaps buys too
readily into the idea of the primitive club-wielding male warrior subduing the
women of his tribe with violence. The white male colonialists avow more genteel
and Christian attitudes, yet dispassionately dole out cruel floggings and
conduct executions, both of which the Indigenous observers see as obscene. The reality of gendered violence is complex
and I would be interested to read if the level of violence toward women in
Indigenous society at the time of colonisation Dark asserts as the norm can be
substantiated and how much that differed
from the incidence in white society.
The
depiction of Barangaroo is problematic. Dark uses the epithet ‘shrew’ of her
repeatedly and suggests there is something erratic and childish about her
expressions of emotion but is nevertheless admiring of her pride in entering the
Governor’s house in her natural unclothed state and her suspicion of the white
invaders. Having just watched a
promotional video for the Sydney Harbour foreshore re-development named for
Barangaroo which presents her in a revisionist ‘girl power’ light, I think we are still working out who
she was in her own time and context and how we relate to her as a modern day
cultural icon.
As I am prone to, I have focused on some quibbles here, but I do need to say unequivocally that I am glad I read The Timeless Land and think it worth any reader’s while. I am awestruck by the conscientiousness and depth of Eleanor Dark’s historical research - she draws on a plethora of fascinating contemporary documents – and by the vast canvas she chose and then faithfully filled (especially considering there are two sequel novels, The Storm of Time and No Barrier). She sets the bar for social history that is both illuminating and interrogative. Her account of the establishment of the colony of New South Wales would have been revolutionary when first released. I wonder if the television adaptation did the books justice, not sure I have the courage to find out.
I would be
intrigued to know what today’s Indigenous readers and writers think of the book(s).
In my research for this post I discovered that Yothu Yindi had a 1990s hit with
the song Timeless Land which suggests
they didn’t disdain the connection.
References
Tim
Piccione, The Wagga Wagga Daily Advertiser, July 8 2022
Antonio
Simoes Da Silva’s Revising the past/Revisioning the future: A
postcolonial reading of Eleanor Dark's 'The Timeless Land' trilogy
https://ro.uow.edu.au/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=2481&context=lhapapers
Yothu Yindi ‘Timeless Land’ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O7TWJMO4k3k
