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| Stella (2009 - 2022) |
Last night I had the great pleasure of seeing Sunshine Super Girl at Wagga’s Civic Theatre. The play is Yorta Yorta/Gunaikurnai woman, Andrea James’ immaculately crafted telling of Wiradjuri tennis star, Evonne Goolagong’s rise from her modest Barellan upbringing to international fame and acclaim. Written with Ms Goolagong’s cooperation and using several of her real life anecdotes , the play treats small town life and community, incipient and overt racism, sexual predation, contemporary politics, 70s fashion, the relentlessness of championship tennis and both Evonne’s vulnerability and tenacity with a lightness of touch, sensitivity and humour that make for a very rewarding production.
Ella Ferris is
charismatic in the central role taking us from 3 year old Evonne’s first encounter
with a tennis ball retrieved from the back seat of her dad’s beat up old car,
through her parents’ dedication and neighbours’ assistance to learn to play tennis
and get the right gear, to lodging with Vic Edwards (her coach)’s family in
Sydney’s northern suburbs, to encountering the quaint traditions of Wimbledon
and the gruelling impact of the international tennis scene. The last most poignantly
affecting when Evonne learns of her father’s death in a motor accident while competing
in the US Open and is persuaded that sedation and then playing on is preferable
to going home for his funeral.
The Cawley–Goolagong
love story is handled with the understatement and charm that was the hallmark
of their blossoming relationship. The scene where they sneak a romantic picnic
at the laundromat is delightful. Lincoln Elliot gets the honourable occasional G&T
sipping Roger Cawley’s accent and body language beautifully. While Jax Compton's delightfully over the top
caricature of John Newcombe brings a nice touch of broad humour to the Knightsbridge
party scenes.
Apart from the play’s overall excellent construction and setting, Vicki Van Hout’s and Katina Olsen’s choreographed tennis moves make the action hypnotic and show the audience Evonne’s evolving skills and the challenges she faced from opponents like Margaret Court.
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| Evonne Goolagong-Cawley and playwright/director Andrea James (source: https://news.aboriginalartdirectory.com/2020/09/sunshine-supergirl.php) |
There is so much to say in praise of Sunshine Super Girl but the other motifs that struck me were Evonne’s (and her Mum’s) love of fishing and their traditional knowledge about the best waters to fish in (images of which open and close the play) and the depiction of an Indigenous yarning circle making the link between all the forms of string and twine that bind and hold us, like the grip of a hand on a racquet!
One reviewer I
read said they thought this play would enter the canon and be produced repeatedly
over years to come. It certainly deserves that and judging by the number of
young people in last night’s audience it will act as inspiration for new generations
of potential tennis champions.
1. The Thornbers
Before we moved to
Wagga Wagga eight years ago I knew little about the city. I was vaguely aware from
my time at the (now defunct) professional craft artists’ organisation, Craft
Australia, that Wagga was home to a significant collection of Australian art glass.
A reconnoitre mission prior to committing to the move yielded more positive
findings. As well as the Glass Gallery, Wagga
has an impressive regional art gallery; Wagga has a pool complex that runs aqua
aerobics every day of the week almost all year round, and Wagga’s Civic Theatre
is on the circuit for enough of the performers and productions we want to see
to keep our diaries happily full. On
arrival we also quickly discovered the charms of Pomilgalarna, the Wollundry Lagoon
and the Victory Memorial and Botanic Gardens and the delight of seeing
‘womboynes’ (Wiradjuri word for kangaroos) bounding about behind our house.
Still to come though was
the surprise of two family connections. I’ve been doing genealogy for a few
years, filling the void created because my mother was an only child, we left
England when I was eleven and my father maintained very few links with his Australian
family. I’ve experienced the peculiarly modern day Australian delight of uncovering
convict ancestors and then the disappointment of discovering that one of them,
the famously spirited Tasmanian inn keeper, Rachel Hoddy who arrived on the
Lady Juliana in 1789, was mis-identified as a relation.
A felon of a later era does however retain his place in our tree. Henri Garnay (aka Henri Chapins /Adolphe Mathey) married my great grand aunt Pauline Emilie Pittard in 1885. For the marriage certificate he represented himself as ‘a photographer in private life’, not revealing his former incarceration in New Caledonia for forgery or his conviction for carrying housebreaking implements in Sydney some four years earlier. It is one of his daughters (he and Pauline had time to conceive two before he was deported in 1887), Armandine Garnay, whose link to Wagga I first discovered. Despite her humble origins, Armie married well. Her groom in 1911 was South Australian born Lawrence (Laurie) Rowland Thornber, from a successful family of bankers and teachers. His career with the Union Bank spanned 43 years and 22 of those were spent first in Wagga and then in nearby Henty.
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Armandine & Laurie |
When we sit outside at our favourite café in Johnston Street, the former Union Bank, where Laurie was accountant from 1923 to 1926, is directly in our line of vision. The building now houses Boyce Chartered Accountants, but its exterior remains little changed since Laurie’s day and it isn’t hard to imagine him at work behind his desk inside. Nor is it hard to picture the Thornbers out and about in 1920s Wagga pursuing their interests. Both Laurie and my first cousin twice removed, Armie were keen golfers and their wins at the Wagga Golf Club, then situated on the site of the Murrumbidgee Turf Club, were frequently reported. Laurie was the club’s auditor in 1924 while Armie was a founding member and Treasurer of the Wagga Wagga Shakespeare Club.
Their stay in Wagga was brief as in 1926 Laurie was promoted to manager of the Union Bank’s Henty branch some 60 kilometers away. Far from diluting the sense of propinquity, learning this fact intrigued me further. I first heard of Henty and its annual Field Day from a colleague raised in Albury who regularly sang the Henty Field Day song to us at work. With that auspicious introduction, I was excited to visit the town. Initially unaware of the family connection I contented myself with admiring the famous (locally at least) Henty Man. When I returned it was to see the old Union Bank building in Sladen Street where Laurie, Armie and their daughter Norma had resided. The elegant two storey corner building combined banking premises and spacious accommodation but is now a private residence.
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Former Union Bank, 33 Sladen Street, Henty |
It was a balmy day and to my delight the current owner had the door open while renovating the hallway. When he saw me excitedly staring at the building and photographing the exterior he was kind enough to invite me in. I saw the banking chamber, the old safe door, Laurie’s office, the kitchen, living room and bedrooms. My spine tingled as I imagined Armie hosting CWA meetings to raise funds for the hospital or giving her celebrated needlework demonstrations there and Norma meeting with the local youth group, nattily named ‘The Younger Set’, up until her marriage in 1940 disqualified her from membership and she was presented with a parting gift of a 'Cutex' leather encased manicure set. It is hard to explain the frisson I experienced despite never having known or, until recently, known of, these relatives. I found treading where they had trod an emotional and rewarding experience.
Laurie and Armie remained in Henty for some 13 years after his retirement in 1945 eventually joining their daughter and her family in Quirindi, northern NSW where they died within a few months of one another in 1973.
2. Semple Misfortune
The other coincidence is less jolly. It relates to my husband’s family and this time the DNA has not left the district!
My husband is descended from Welsh miners via Newcastle NSW on his mother’s side and London tradespeople via Melbourne on his father’s. While it is a popular belief that migrants from the UK generally benefited from relocating to Australia both sides of our families contain examples of misfortune hampering attempts to build a life in a new land. A qualified engineer died a pauper in my family and my husband’s great great grandfather John Semple (1815-1860) perished under sad circumstances after trying for a decade to make a success of his timber business. John, his wife of 5 years, Mary, and daughters Susannah and Mary jnr arrived in Victoria aboard the Alice Maude in 1849. They had 4 more children in the following decade. Plotting his course via newspaper archives, I traced his involvement with the dissolution of the Golden Cross Timber Yard business in 1855, his fine for sourcing wood on Crown Land in 1857 and the establishment then lapse into bankruptcy of his own timber import and merchandising business at Melbourne’s Batman’s Hill during 1858-60.
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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
Review: Comedy of Errors, Bell Shakespeare, Civic Theatre, Wagga Wagga, 9 July 2022
The promotional material for Bell Shakespeare’s current production of The Comedy of Errors describes it as “a hilarious romp of swapped identities, misguided love, mistaken imprisonment and chaotic mishaps, leading to an unbelievably crazy day for bumbling twins”. It goes on to say, and this is where the first note of caution is sounded, “at the heart of this tale of comedic misfortune is an old man searching for his lost children. He finds himself in a hostile land, in the fight of his life... to save his life. As far-fetched coincidences unfold, chaotic hilarity ensues and a man’s life could be saved — if only everything would go to plan”
The Comedy of Errors is early Shakespeare. It is his
shortest play, a farce composed of slapstick, mistaken identity and a
tortuous amount of word play which, to a modern audience,
is almost unfathomable without accompanying explanation or skilfully enacted ‘shtick’ to illuminate the
risqué or obscure analogies being made.
This Janine Watson-directed production only occasionally manages to
provide that. The rest of the time we laugh with slight embarrassment knowing
from the presentation that we are witnessing something supposedly uproarious
but mystified as to what it might be.
But back to that clue to Watson’s interpretation provided on the
website. The old man, Egeon, is or would be a tragic figure if he were not so
clearly a plot device. His role in the opening act is to give us the backstory so
that we understand why there are 2 sets of identical twins roaming around oblivious
to each other because they haven't clapped eyes on each other since becoming separated during a shipwreck
some 30 years earlier. We need a
springboard for the absurd events of the play to enfold and some anchoring of
the mayhem in a plausible event. However Watson makes a strange choice –
instead of making Egeon’s opening monologue the painless if poignant exposition
it needs to be (I would have used projected graphics) she gets the actor to
precede the speech with a series of writhing hand gestures which may or may not
be intended to evoke the motion of ocean waves or be a nod to the Indigenous
dance prowess of actor Maitland Schnaars. He then delivers a speech of 88 lines
unalleviated by nuance, light or shade and the Duke of Ephesus, here played by
female actor, Alex King, in militaristic khaki bedecked with a sash and medals
and the most glistening red footwear since Dorothy’s ruby slippers, responds by
saying it all sounds very sad, she is obliged to sentence him to death because
he is an unwelcome Syracusian, but she will give him 24 hours to pay a fine
that will spare him execution.
Between this, the next, and several following scenes there is much
jiving to disco music of the 80s (so cute seeing the cast ironically recreating
poses and outfits from an era before most of them were born) and choreographed
hoisting and stacking of suitcases. We get it, one set of Antipholuses and
Dromios is arriving in search of their matching bookend selves and all is in
flux and frivolous on the island of Ephesus.
The series of ‘hilarious’ mix ups now ensues. Everyone mistakes each
Antipholus and Dromio for the other pair including they themselves and poor
Adriana, wife of the Ephesian Antipholus, rants, raves and almost rends her Osti
patio gown in perplexity at his refusal first to come home to dinner and then
to acknowledge her as his missus when he does. Giemi Contini, no doubt under strict
direction, starts her performance at a histrionic fever pitch she maintains
throughout the action until the penny drops about 5 minutes from the end of the
play that her husband is an identical twin whereupon she goes all docile and
lovey dovey.
Challenging unnecessary cis casting, Adriana’s sibling, Luciana/o is
played, rather delightfully by Joseph ‘Wunujaka’ Althouse (the quotation marks
are used in the program) as a wise, loyal and winsome gay man in Bermuda shorts
and a fluoro fair isle vest that rivals Adriana’s tropical moo moo. Watson thus manages to be both woke and to
elicit a few old school giggles when Syracusian Antipholus comes on to him.
The disco theme wanes as the play progresses and Watson hints at
something existential by briefly adding a neon ‘find yourself’ sign to the back
drop that has displayed a ‘wish you were here’ sign throughout the production
and having the two Dromios peer, pose and sway on either side of a mirror on
wheels that substitutes for the doorway to Ephesian Antipholus’s house. I was
half expecting a Patty Duke/Groucho Marx routine. The most bizarre ‘who is really who?’ and ‘are
we complete without our other self?’ moment comes when one Dromio/Antipholus
pair wind a rope round the other. We know this is symbolic because of the slo
mo, music and lighting but also because no one acknowledges that both sets of
twins are participating in the same scene which they don’t officially do until
the end of the play. All presumably very
deep, but signifying what?
I won’t dwell on the unsatisfying portrayal of Dr Pinch and the abortive
attempts to exorcise the demons from Syracusian Antipholus except to say that
Leilani Loau keeps on the white smock she wears to play the doctor when she
transitions into the Abbess in the next scene, just deleting and adding
accessories. She appeared much more comfortable pontificating about madness and
sanctuary in a wide eyed elder states womanly way than she did being the
quack. She also gets to unravel the
confusion about the two sets of twins and reveal that she is in fact Aegon’s
long lost wife (a little matter she had kept schtumm about for 2 decades).
Finally we see brothers and parents, servants and masters reunited. For
this Watson creates a kind of caterpillar group hug tableau evoking a
profundity somewhat at odds with the preceding farce. Given her statement about
‘an old man searching for
his lost children’ - a reference to the stolen generations?
I’ve seen John Bell on Q
& A arguing for the continued relevance of Shakespeare and his works’ infinite
capacity for reinvention. There was a bit of that going on in this production.
The most obvious being casting women in roles traditionally played by men
which, as Upstart Crow reminds us, is any and all of them! Having gender fluid Dromios
worked and the chemistry of the Dromios and Antipholuses worked too. (Skyler
Ellis and Felix Jozeps were very enjoyable to watch). What felt forced and
clunky was the imposition of the disco tunes and the resort imagery and
costumes. Were they supposed to evoke
the other worldliness/fairyland quality of Ephesus? Then there was the ensemble
dynamic which never quite gelled, partly because of the dissimilar styles of
the performers and partly because the action was fragmented by the obsessive
use of the moving sets of steps and protracted choreographed sequences reminiscent of Sean Micallef’s Clockwork Movement dance routines.
The Comedy of Errors is
difficult to bring to contemporary audiences.
Its absurd plot demands total mastery of the farce style and its archaic
textual references challenge an audience’s comprehension even in the hands and
mouths of the most accomplished actors. Making the play accessible and funny
today is a tall order and overlaying it with daffy disco hits, spurious social
references and ponderous existential montages is not the way to do it.
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).
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).
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.
