AustLit

'This essay uses the interwar writing of Eleanor Dark to destabilise the binary between nationalist-realism and experimental modernism in accounts of Australian literature. Dark’s novels mix modernist and experimental styles with middlebrow and vernacular forms, while also legitimating settler nationalist desires. This constellation was not unique to Dark but was part of a broader phenomenon which I call interwar settler modernism: the modernism produced by settler artists and writers between the wars, often through a promiscuous engagement with elite, middlebrow and vernacular forms of culture. Dark’s novel Return to Coolami (1936) exemplifies interwar settler modernism, combining recognisably modernist techniques with middlebrow romance, elements of vernacular culture such as photography, cinema and motor travel, and cultural-nationalist ideas. This study traces some of the contours of interwar settler modernism through examining Dark’s ideas about visual perception, time, memory and interior psychological states. It will explore the implications of settler modernism for studies of Australian literature and, more broadly, for global modernism studies.'

Source: Abstract.

'Eleanor Dark’s novel “Pilgrimage” has never been published. She began writing it in January 1921, a year before her marriage, and finished it in the late 1920s, when she and Eric Dark were establishing their home in Katoomba.1 In the early 1930s, Eleanor tried to get “Pilgrimage” published, sending it to her literary agent in London, and showing it to P.R. Stephensen, who had published her novel Prelude to Christopher in Sydney in 1934 (Brooks with Clark 122). “Pilgrimage” was not accepted for publication, and Eleanor appears to have abandoned any attempt at this.' (Introduction)

'In Eleanor Dark’s novel Waterway (1938), Professor Channon is prompted by the ominous international headline ‘Failure of Peace Talks’ to imagine the world from a global perspective (120). Channon feels himself metaphorically ‘lifted away from the earth … seeing it from an incredible distance, and with an incredible, an all-embracing comprehension’ (119-20). This move outward from a located perspective to ‘a more detached overview of a wider global space’ signifies a cosmopolitan viewpoint, ‘in which the viewing subject rises above the placebound attachments of the nation-state to take the measure of the world as a wider totality’ (Hegglund 8-9). Yet even this global view is mediated by Channon’s position from within ‘a great island continent alone in its south sea’ (121). Gazing from a ‘vast distance,’ he views Europe as ‘the patches where parasitic man had lived longest and most densely,’ and from which humankind ‘went out to infect fresh lands’ (120). This description of old world Europe as ‘parasitic’ provides a glimpse of resistant nationalism, reflecting Channon’s location within one of the ‘fresh lands’ affected by colonisation. Channon is ultimately unable to sustain a ‘Godlike’ perspective in this scene, desiring ‘nothing but to return’ to local place (121). Although his view initially ‘vaults beyond the bounds of national affiliation’ (Alexander and Moran 4), this move outward does not ‘nullify an affective attachment to the more grounded locations of human attachment’ (Hegglund 20). Channon’s return to the ‘shabby home … of his own humanity’ brings a renewed sense of connection to ‘the sun-warmed rail of the gate’ and ‘the faint breeze [which] ruffled the hair back from his forehead’ (122).' (Introduction)

'At the age of ten, Anna Wickham (1883–1947), born Edith Alice Mary Harper, promised her father that she would become a poet. She made the promise in Wickham Terrace in Brisbane, where her family lived for a period after emigrating from London. She later adopted the pseudonym ‘Anna Wickham’ in honour of this moment. Wickham’s life was strikingly transnational. She departed Australia in 1904 to study opera singing in London and Paris, and shared friendships with many prominent writers, including D.H. Lawrence, Katherine Mansfield and Dylan Thomas. Her husband, Patrick Hepburn, opposed her writing. In 1913, he had Wickham incarcerated in an asylum for several months, during which she wrote eighty more poems. By the time of her death by suicide in 1947, Wickham had written over 1,400 poems. Her work suffered some critical neglect in traditional accounts of literary modernism; however, critics are now beginning to recognise her as a significant modernist and feminist poet.' (Introduction)