Connecting Water and Land: Revisiting Nationalism in the Vitalist Aesthetics of Eleanor Dark and Vance Palmer

Kuttainen, Victoria

Abstract

[Extract] Eleanor Dark is arguably best remembered for the Timeless Land trilogy that deals with the foundation, settlement and nation-building of Australia. Yet, it would be wrong to assume that Dark was an unreserved nationalist. The last novel of the trilogy, No Barrier (1953), follows the discovery of a route over the Blue Mountains to the building of the first road, after which there would be “no barrier” to the expansion of settlement beyond Sydney Harbour. This road, Dark worried, meant that unsustainable development would penetrate westward into the previously sparsely settled interior. As Meg Brayshaw has recently observed, and as Melinda Cooper has separately acknowledged, against this overarching epic of the land taken up with the penetration of the interior, a large body of Dark’s work instead focused on coasts, harbours and seaways.2 This vein of Dark’s work registered a protest against the degradation of the environment and a critical, if not unproblematic, appraisal of white settlement and development. As the epigraph to this chapter indicates, Dark actively resisted this kind of colonising nationalism.

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Time, Tide and History Essays on the Writing of Eleanor Dark

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9781743329665

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Sydney University Press

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Sydney, NSW, Australia

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