Writing from the Hinterland
Eleanor Dark's Queensland Years
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.1017/S1321816600006802Keywords:
Eleanor Dark, Queensland literature, rural hinterland, modes of productionAbstract
Eleanor Dark's years in Montville represent an unusual moment in the history of Queensland literature: it was one of the rare instances, until recent times, of an established professional writer moving to Queensland and pursuing her career in a small rural community. Since the 1980s, the Sunshine Coast and its hinterland have become something of a mecca for writers. None of the later arrivals, however, has pursued Dark's project of viewing the wider world from the hinterland. In Lantana Lane she intertwines meticulous observation of local life, in which she participated as a farmer, with wider cultural and political concerns. She transforms the apparently inauspicious location of the hinterland into a vantage point from which to reflect on modes of production, from the agricultural to the literary.
References
Dark, Eleanor, diary, 26 Oct 1955, Mitchell Library Manuscript Collection 4545 Box 18.
Jane Thompson to Eleanor Dark, 12.5.[1959], 4545 Box 24; quoted in Barbara Brooks and Judith Clark, Eleanor Dark: A Writer's Life, Sydney: Macmillan, 1998, p 410.
See McKay, Belinda, Queensland Review,
Coungeau, Emily, ‘The Glasshouse Mountains, Queensland’, Stella Australis: Poems, Verses and Prose Fragments, Brisbane: Gordon and Gotch, 1914, p 30.
Emily Hemans Bulcock, Jacaranda Blooms and Other Poems, Brisbane: Queensland Book Depot, [n.d., 1923?], pp 23–24, 46.
Emily Hemans Bulcock, From Quenchless Springs, Brisbane: privately published, [1945].
Malouf, David, ‘Glasshouse Mountains’, The Year of the Foxes and Other Poems, New York: George Braziller, 1979, pp 28–29.
Palmer, Nettie, 19 January 1929, Nettie Palmer: Her Private Journal Fourteen Years, Poems, Reviews and Literary Essays, ed. Smith, Vivian, St Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 1988, pp 40–41.
Palmer, Vance, The Passage [1930], 1st Australian ed, Melbourne: Robertson and Mullens, 1944, p 279.
Eleanor Dark's essay, ‘The Blackall Range Country’ (Walkabout, 1 November 1955, pp 18–20), is similar in tone and subject matter to some of the chapters of Lantana Lane.
Dark, Eleanor, Lantana Lane, London and Sydney, Collins, 1959, p 101.
Astley, Thea, ‘Being a Queenslander: A Form of Literary and Geographical Conceit,’ Southerly 36, p 23.
Dark, Lantana Lane, p 101.
Dark, Lantana Lane, p 80.
Dark, Lantana Lane, pp 40, 252.
Dark, Lantana Lane, p 141. See Barbara Brooks and Judith Clark, Eleanor Dark: A Writer's Life, Sydney: Macmillan, 1998.
Dark, Lantana Lane, p 141.
Dark, The Little Company, Sydney: Collins, 1945, p 128.
Dark, Lantana Lane, p 252.
Dark, The Little Company, p 291. Gilbert Massey, while rejecting the reduction of his wife to an abstract problem, nonetheless suggests that she might be seen as an example of ‘Sex Ignorance and Female Parasitism as Factors in Maintaining the Capitalist Status Quo’.
Dark, Lantana Lane, p 251.
Dark, Eleanor, ‘Political Parties’, unpublished essay, Mitchell Library Manuscript Collection 4545 Box 10; quoted in Barbara Brooks, Eleanor Dark: A Writer's Life, Sydney: Pan Macmillan, 1998, p 306.
Dark, Lantana Lane, p 95.
Dark, Lantana Lane, p 103.
Dark, Lantana Lane, pp 253–254.
