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.
