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Writing from the Hinterland: Eleanor Dark's Queensland Years

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  26 February 2016

Belinda McKay
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Extract

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.

Type
Research Article
Information
Queensland Review , Volume 8 , Issue 2 , November 2001 , pp. 21 - 28
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 

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References

Notes

1 Dark, Eleanor, diary, 26 Oct 1955, Mitchell Library Manuscript Collection 4545 Box 18.Google Scholar

2 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.Google Scholar

3 See McKay, Belinda, Queensland Review,Google Scholar

4 Coungeau, Emily, ‘The Glasshouse Mountains, Queensland’, Stella Australis: Poems, Verses and Prose Fragments, Brisbane: Gordon and Gotch, 1914, p 30.Google Scholar

5 Emily Hemans Bulcock, Jacaranda Blooms and Other Poems, Brisbane: Queensland Book Depot, [n.d., 1923?], pp 23–24, 46.Google Scholar

6 Emily Hemans Bulcock, From Quenchless Springs, Brisbane: privately published, [1945].Google Scholar

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9 Palmer, Vance, The Passage [1930], 1st Australian ed, Melbourne: Robertson and Mullens, 1944, p 279.Google Scholar

10 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.Google Scholar

11 Dark, Eleanor, Lantana Lane, London and Sydney, Collins, 1959, p 101.Google Scholar

12 Astley, Thea, ‘Being a Queenslander: A Form of Literary and Geographical Conceit,’ Southerly 36, p 23.Google Scholar

13 Dark, Lantana Lane, p 101.Google Scholar

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18 Dark, The Little Company, Sydney: Collins, 1945, p 128.Google Scholar

19 Dark, Lantana Lane, p 252.Google Scholar

20 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’.Google Scholar

21 Dark, Lantana Lane, p 251.Google Scholar

22 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.Google Scholar

23 Dark, Lantana Lane, p 95.Google Scholar

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