AustLit

In her entry on Eleanor Dark in the Australian Dictionary of Biography, Marivic Wyndham notes that “psychology fascinated Dark, and the bush was her physical and spiritual solace.” As Wyndham continues, “[Dark] drew compelling landscapes of the mind and of the Australian natural environment.”1 This article will discuss the dissolution of boundaries between the landscape and mindscape in Dark’s work, and it will consider how the natural world infiltrates modernist explorations of interiority in Dark’s third published novel, Return to Coolami (1936).2 In examining the convergence of modernism and ecopoetics in Dark’s prose, this essay brings together two supposedly distinct modes of critical enquiry: environmental humanities scholarship and modernism studies. By exploring the intersection of these two approaches, this reading will challenge the binary conception in which modernist texts lack any authorial, subjective, or narratorial investment in the natural world and, in so doing, bring to light a range of complementarities between ecopoetics and modernism. In Return to Coolami, the natural world inescapably affects human interiority, and Dark’s eco-modern prose precipitates a new awareness of ecological being that complicates anthropocentric worldviews.' (Introduction)

'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.

'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)