A literary analysis of Eleanor Dark's trilogy : The treatment of white settlement and the natives in Australia

Abstract

Like other writers and artists before and after her, Dark moved from the city looking for space, peace, and cheaper living, in search of a place where she could make the kind of life she wanted. 'The first house sits in the hollow of the heart', Dorothy Hewett wrote. The house that sat in the hollow of Eleanor Dark's heart was Varuna, where she lived for more than sixty years, and wrote most of her novels. In 1923, in the wake of the Great War, the rosy, pleasure-mad years before economic depression, Eleanor Dark and her husband, Eric Dark, came to Katoomba, in the Blue Mountains. Varona then was a weatherboard cottage in two acres of wild garden surrounded by big pines. Writing was her intellectual and emotional pleasure; gardening and walking in the bush provided the balance: the active outdoors testing the body instead of the restless mind. She spent hours in her garden admiring its resident bowerbird, the gang gangs that dropped pinecones on the roof of her studio, and visiting possums. In fact, she was one of the first gardeners to use native plants from the surrounding country, as well as exotics. The whole high plateau was covered with dwarf banksias, and their orange flowers had variations of pink and red which she had not seen elsewhere. She closed a hand over one of them gently, thinking that of all flowers only these, and perhaps waratahs, were to be enjoyed by the sense of touch as well as the senses of sight and smell... you could cup you hand over a waratah, or close it round a banksia, and these cool, tough and sturdy flowers gave back to your palm a rubbery resistance. (Eleanor Dark, Water in Moko Creek, AUSTRALIA, March 1946 in Barbara Brooks, 'Varuna - A Writer's House' [On-line], 2000) Both Dark and her husband were great bush walkers, always camping, walking, climbing, exploring. Both of them loved the depth and distance in this mountain country and they were fully appreciative that it was not a tourist theme park ('Give me a blue view without a railing', one of her characters says).