An Almost Timeless Classic

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.

Bennelong dressed in some of the garments given to him in England. The caption of this portrait by an unknown artist states that upon his return to Australia he once again embraced his 'savage ways', expressing an imperialist reactionary sentiment that  Eleanor Dark did much to challenge. Source SLNSW.

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.

Eleanor Dark with the manuscript of The Storm in Time, the second novel

 in the trilogy. Source Varuna website

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

https://www.dailyadvertiser.com.au/story/7812533/mobile-library-truck-ceases-operations-amid-dispute-with-wagga-council/

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

Still a bit in the dark about Eleanor

 

Brooks' and Clark's biography of Australian author Eleanor Dark, 

Pan McMillan 1998 (my photograph).

I enjoy reading biographies.  Well-researched and written biographies provide insights into the subject’s career and character and illuminate an era. They can be immensely pleasurable and even transporting to read. Norman Mailer’s Oswald’s Tale, John Lahr’s Prick Up Your Ears, Nadia Wheatley’s The Life and Myth of Charmian Clift and Hayden Herrera’s Frida all achieved that for me.   Two of those are quite hefty tomes, and another enjoyable read, Peter Ackroyd’s Dickens, is over 1000 pages.  So length is not a disincentive for me if the author keeps my interest and genuinely evokes the texture of its subject’s life and times.

Disappointingly though, Eleanor Dark - A Writer’s Life by Barbara Brooks (with Judith Clark) published by Pan McMillan Australia 1998 did not reward my perseverance through its 488 pages.   I confess I have not read any of Eleanor Dark’s novels though I had certainly heard of The Timeless Land.  I fully intend to read some now as this biography’s painstaking recounting of the plot of each of her works, replete with large slabs of quoted text, made me yearn for the source uninterrupted by commentary on what Miles Franklin or Nettie Palmer thought.  The frequent quotes from correspondence and reviews only serve to show that tastes differ and that few books are 100% successful in achieving what the writer sets out to do. They were overused and tedious, an exception being this response to The Timeless Land from US poet, Karl Shapiro which is so delightful that it made me resolve to track down his work.

(The Timeless Land) has left a wonderful flavor with me. It’s andante, acrid, blue, warm as sky,  inwoven like tapestry,  hung in that  space of Australian atmosphere, not quite tragic, wiser than nostalgia full of peace. (What a jumble of epithets that is)…  (quoted p. 360).

US poet Karl Shapiro on leave in Katoomba during WW2, possibly at the Dark's home, Varuna (source: Blue Mountains Library)

Between 1934 and 1953 Eleanor Dark published 10 novels. She was initially known for her challenging, sometimes melodramatic, subject matter and a modernist style likened to Virginia Woolf’s. From 1941 and thereafter  she became synonymous with the epic historical saga of Australia’s early colonial days known collectively as The Timeless Land after the first novel in a trilogy which also included Storm of Time (1948) and No Barrier (1953)

Towards the end of her career, Eleanor Dark only wrote intermittently and was not satisfied with what she produced.  She published nothing new between 1956 and her death in 1985. Always restless and self-critical, Eleanor described herself (as the thinly disguised protagonist in an abandoned draft) as merely a ‘competent’ writer. I suspect she was being harsh but I have yet to experience her prose outside the clumps reproduced by Brooks.

The portrait of Eleanor Dark that emerges from this biography is of a cerebral rather aloof person with a strong social conscience and a belief in the lessons of history who did not suffer fools or organised politics gladly.  Retreating from a dysfunctional and fragmented family life she and husband Dr Eric Dark forged themselves a comfortable middle class existence in their spacious Katoomba house where Eleanor was able to write full-time  (notwithstanding maternal and domestic responsibilities which on a bad day irritated her significantly). She and Eric were part of the Blue Mountains intellectual set, great readers and theatre goers and keen bush walkers Eleanor’s spent many hours in the garden of their property Varuna incorporate cultivating native species, an environmentalist before the term was coined.  Both were committed to the Blue Mountains community, Eric offering affordable medical care to patients many decades before Medibank was introduced. The Darks were instrumental in organising child care and a library for evacuee children during WW2. Eleanor was supportive of her husband’s politics, more overtly socialist than her own, and both suffered from reactionary public opinion during the McCarthyist era.

In The Timeless Land and a 1944 essay for The Weekend Book , Eleanor  represented the truth about British colonisation of  Australia, in the latter  using the phrase ‘we stole their land’ in relation to the myth of terra nullius and the dispossession of the Aboriginal people probably for the first time in Australian writing

So, there is much I read in Brooks’ book that makes me admire and like Eleanor Dark before even opening the pages of any of her own work. But after 488 pages she still felt like a cypher to me. Her complex relationship with her father and his legacy, her reaction to her mother’s early death, the lukewarm reception she appears to have given the stepson she gained on marriage and the depression and ill health of her final years are all touched on very lightly. I felt there was more to say about these aspects of her life and how they forged her personality and the themes in her writing. A friend of mine who knows her descendants says Eleanor was much warmer than the biography suggests and that her family life was not as dull and serene as it seems from the pages of Brooks’ book.

I am very dutiful  when it comes to finishing a book I start and despite its shortcomings I am glad I read Eleanor Dark - A Writer’s Life to the end because  it has lead me to want to read Eleanor Dark’s books. Then there is her feminism, albeit a feminism that still adopted the pronoun ‘he’ for all humanity, her incorporation of an Aboriginal perspective in The Timeless Land, even if we may now consider her technique cultural appropriation, her apparently amazing evocation of contemporary Sydney in Waterway (1938) and a potential affinity with Virginia Woolf - all of which I am keen to encounter.

There are two ideas of Eleanor’s Brookes communicates which will really resonate with modern readers and which were revolutionary in her era. One is her view on white Australians’ relationship with the land: saying that in their quest to conquer a land perceived as hostile  Europeans had created ‘deserts and dustbowls, wasted natural resources  mutilated lovely places’ and ‘robbed ourselves of spiritual food’. As early as 1949 she proposed a ‘working agreement with the earth we live on’ (quoted on p. 344).  The other is her belief of the importance of us knowing our history including the impact of European arrival on first nations’ people. This belief was the  major impetus for the hundreds of hours spent in research at the Mitchell Library and for writing her Timeless Land trilogy  where the narratives of Bennilong (sic) and Cunembeille are as important as those of Arthur Philip and Stephen Mannion (reference p. 367).

Dust jacket of the 1941 edition of The Timeless Land depicting Bennilong (sic) and Booranga (?) watching the First Fleet arrive, artist uncredited (source: https://theaustralianlegend.wordpress.com/2021/01/23/the-timeless-land/)

I am sure I will find some aspects of Eleanor Dark’s writing of its time or uncomfortable  e.g. her interest in eugenics and her penchant for including a death or disaster as a way of tidying up threads of plot, but I am off to the library and will start with borrowing Waterway I think.