The Timeless Land

By Eleanor Dark

An outstanding literary achievement, meticulously researched and deeply felt, this portrait of the earliest days of the European settlement of Australia remains unrivalled.
the year 1788: the very beginning of European settlement. these were times of hardship, cruelty and danger. Above all, they were times of conflict between the Aborigines and the white settlers.Eleanor Dark brings alive those bitter years with moments of tenderness and conciliation amid the brutality and hostility. the cast of characters includes figures historical and fictional, black and white, convict and settler. All the while, beneath the veneer of British civilisation, lies the baffling presence of Australia, the 'timeless land'.the Storm of time and No Barrier complete the timeless Land trilogy.

• Language: English
• Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers Australia
• Release date: Mar 1, 2013
• ISBN: 9780730496601

Eleanor Dark

Eleanor Dark was born and educated in Sydney. In 1922 she married Dr Eric Dark and soon after settled with him in Katoomba. She published stories and verse throughout the 1920s, and her first novel, Slow Dawning, was published in 1932. Her other novels include Prelude to Christopher, Return to Coolami, Sun Across the Sky, Waterway, The Little Company and Lantana Lane.

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Introduction

By Barbara Brooks

At the end of 1937, Eleanor Dark wrote to her publisher, William Collins, about her next novel. At present I have one historical character, a blackfellow, and the idea of Australia — which is rather an alarmingly large idea, but alluring! What will come out of it I simply do not know.i Eleanor Dark was the novelist who set out to tell the story of the country, from first white settlement in 1788 to the crossing of the Blue Mountains in 1814. She told it in three novels, The Timeless Land, Storm of Time, and No Barrier. The frameworks for her novels were carefully researched and historically accurate accounts of the early settlement of New South Wales; some of her characters are historical figures like Bennilong and Phillip, and some are fictional characters like the Prentices and Mannions.

Imagine her then, travelling between Katoomba and Sydney, when she started her research. She was reading the letters and journals of the officials and early white settlers, as well as the government records, and accounts of the Aboriginal people, spending long days in the Mitchell Library. Imagine her getting up before sunrise in the sharp mountain mornings, and sitting in the train, half awake, travelling towards the city and the sunrise. Passing through the small mountain towns, as they emerged from morning mists; passing the folded ranges and valleys of the mountain wilderness, half-hidden by cloud. All the little mountain towns buried away in this — this vastness.ii In Sydney, finally, imagine her arriving at the State Library of New South Wales, which looks out across the Botanical Gardens and the slopes of the city towards the harbour, towards Mrs Macquarie’s Chair, and Bennelong Point. These names remind us that the story she was chasing began here.

These three books were a major event in Australian writing and culture. They made Australian history accessible to a wider audience — an audience that included novel readers who might not have read a history book, students and teachers, people who came to Australia looking for refuge from persecution and violence in Europe, or for a better life in a new country. The Timeless Land brought Australian history to the attention of an overseas audience as well: it was a Book of the Month Club Choice and a bestseller in the United States in 1941; it was at the top of the Times Literary Supplement Christmas Fiction list in the United Kingdom; later it was translated into German and Swedish. In Australia it has been in print for most of the sixty years since its publication; it was set as a school text in the 1950s, and turned into a mini-series for ABC TV in 1980.

Nettie Palmer was delighted that a novel that was so good could also be so popular. J. S. Manifold called it the nearest thing we have to a national epic. American poet Karl Shapiro saw it as something of a new form, hovering between fiction and nonfiction; and the Bulletin reviewer debated genres: was it a novel or an essay? Was she a historian, a novelist, or a political writer? Most of the historians loved her. Manning Clark said she inspired him to write his own history of Australia; she was one of the mighty spirits in Australian writing. Others debated whether she had romanticised the Aboriginal people, or portrayed them as capable of more complex thought than evidence — or prejudice — suggested.

There is a photograph of Eleanor Dark with the manuscript of Storm of Time, the second novel of the trilogy. Taken in 1948, it shows her standing beside a huge pile of papers, more than half her height (no wonder she called this book the Monster). The photo reminds me of the sheer hard work that she put into the novels, the reading and note-taking, the writing and rewriting, the checking for accuracy, then the attempt to find a way of ordering the facts and shaping a narrative. The trilogy took up sixteen years of her life; she started The Timeless Land in 1937 and No Barrier was published in 1953. And while she reconstructed a past history, another troubled history of war and reconstruction and cold war reeled around her.

Eleanor Dark had published five novels during the 1930s. When she started The Timeless Land her name was known, she had found a voice as a writer. She was one of several women writers dealing with the changing lives of women in the period between the wars, and the developing sense of what it meant to be living in Australia. She had been experimenting with form and structure. The voice she had settled on was an interior voice, the voice of memory and consciousness, moving backwards and forwards through time, focusing on a moment of crisis and change. In the later novels of the 1930s, rather than the single authoritative voice of a central consciousness, there were several interwoven voices, narratives that balance as well as question each other.

Why did Eleanor Dark turn to a completely different genre, the historical novel? In this trilogy she was trying to capture the consciousness of a community, a country. History is to the community as memory is to the individual, she said. Her contemporaries were turning to history — Barnard Eldershaw, Brian Penton and Katherine Susannah Prichard, for example. But look at the scope of what she achieved. She wrote about what Stephen Murray-Smith called the best-documented colonisation in history. Her novels are important because of her intellectual approach to history. She took on the project of looking at the country in its historical, political, and ecological environment. Where did the impetus come from?

Eleanor and Eric Dark had been living in the Blue Mountains since 1923. Her writing had to be fitted in around her domestic commitments — the children, the housework, the phone that, because Eric Dark was a doctor, always had to be answered. Her son and stepson were at school. She had a housekeeper much of the time, and a husband who admired and encouraged her writing. But her diaries record the housework, gardening, jam-making and mending, walks and visits that filled her days, as well as the early mornings when she wrote before breakfast and the nights when she worked on her writing until she was too tired. Finding time was always an issue.

There were political and social changes taking place that would change the lives of the Darks, and all of the liberal intelligentsia. In December 1936, when she was writing Waterway, and wrote in her diary, … I began to work but got reading History of NSW instead,iii Franco was talking about victory in Spain. That year, the Nazis went into the Rhineland, the Fascists were marching in London, Italian troops invaded Abyssinia, and Japan invaded China. Trotsky left for Mexico. Christina Stead would write:

The disruption of the bourgeois world, its disorders and anomalies, the frightful insistence on economic questions, leaves the writer, whatever his origins, quite at sea.iv

The Great Depression of the 1930s made the Darks reassess their political ideas. Eric Dark was affected by what he saw happening to his patients during this time. He began to move to the left and by 1938 was writing about the connections between medicine and society, poverty and disease. Eleanor Dark already called herself a socialist. She had grown up in an unconventional household, where her parents argued with each other, and her father argued with his friends, about politics, ideas, the arts.

Of course I’m a Socialist … Everybody of any intelligence is a Socialist nowadays.v

A combination of economic issues, fascism in Europe and what dissenting voices called fascism at home made a comfortable liberal humanism seem inadequate. By the late 1930s the Darks, like so many others, were looking back to the First World War and fearing another war. Her awareness of the economic crisis just past and the war soon to come creates an underlying tension in Waterway.

If we don’t find the true causes of this thing and destroy them it will happen all over again.vi

They believed they were living in a country where they could influence the course of change. A sense of the past would help them to understand the present and talk about the future. In Melbourne, Brian Fitzpatrick was laying the foundations of a left-wing historiography. Eleanor met Brian and Dorothy Fitzpatrick (also a historian) researching at the Mitchell Library. Nettie and Vance Palmer had been talking about cultural nationalism for years.

We have to discover ourselves — our character, the character of our country, the particular kind of society that has developed here … through the searching explorations of literature.vii

Eleanor Dark lived a fairly secluded life in the Blue Mountains, despite letters and visits from Miles Franklin, the Palmers, the Fitzpatricks, the Evatts and others. She looked out from a house perched on the end of a ridge, where, if it wasn’t for the trees that enclosed the house, she could almost watch over the stillness and space of the Jamieson Valley. Now the Blue Mountains is a commuter belt, developed and heavily touristed, but still that view takes you away from urban development, civilisation or what passes for it, and makes a lot of things seem irrelevant. Silence ruled this land, she wrote.

Out of silence mystery comes, and magic, and the delicate awareness of unreasoning things.viii

The Darks loved the bush. They went on long walks most days, took their visitors on picnics, spent weekends and holidays walking, climbing, camping, exploring. Eleanor writes about being bitten by bull ants, about the goanna that stole her lunch, about the cool rubbery feel of the banksia and waratah flowers, about the bush being a consolation to her, and the physical exertion of walking being a balance to the fretful deskbound time in her study. In Katoomba the story goes that Eleanor Dark wrote The Timeless Land in a cave. The Darks had a cave they used as a weekender; she didn’t go there to write, but she must have been thinking, as she walked and camped in that country, about the lives and stories of the original inhabitants, and what it was like when the first European settlers came. She wrote about this area so well because she knew it. When she was writing The Timeless Land she, Eric and their son, Michael, set out to follow the track of the expedition led by Dawes and sent by Phillip in 1789 to try to cross the mountains. Eric Dark was a good bushman and they kept to the main ridge; Dawes and his company had floundered in and out of the valleys and had to return to the settlement.

When she finished Waterway, Eleanor began reading Australian history, preparing for an article on Caroline Chisholm, her first piece of historical writing. It was for a book on women pioneers, a protest against the way the Australian Sesquicentennial celebrations of 1938 glossed over the more controversial aspects of Australian history — the Aboriginals, the convicts, even women. Caroline Chisholm was a seductive character for Eleanor: an independent thinker who made a contribution to public life, a mother and wife, a forceful woman who not only spoke out against what she saw as wrong but also took practical steps to improve conditions for women immigrants in the 1850s. As Eleanor read the history of New South Wales, the issues that stood out were like black shadows across the bright picture: the treatment of Aboriginal people, the treatment of the convicts, and the exploitation of the country by landowners who stayed long enough to make money and then went home, taking their money with them. These were the issues she would write about in her novels.

Then it was 1939, with the declaration of war, the introduction of press censorship, encroachments on civil liberties, the sense of crisis — she and her contemporaries began to think their occupation might be a luxury. What should a writer be doing? Both of the Darks were active in their local community during the 1940s, but she kept writing.

I think that because we are living in such times of stress, there’s an intellectual striving. The writer feels this like everyone else, his business is to express it. So when people are searching for an understanding of their problems, they naturally turn to their literature, which gives — or ought to give — a reflection, and perhaps an interpretation, of themselves and their community.ix

She wondered if she should be writing about the momentous contemporary events, but decided that the roots of the problems reached back to the times she was writing about. These novels are histories, and stories, interwoven with Eleanor Dark’s ideas. She asked, how should Australians live? How could we live? What kind of society was possible here? The settlement could have been an experiment, a better society than Europe, not a dumping-ground. What went wrong? Her interpretation of the early settlement of Australia takes into account ideology, class, gender, race and ecology. She asked: Who were the convicts? Why were they transported? What did the British government send to their penal colony?

The greed, the brutality, the strife and the suffering were not born here. They were brought.x

She asked, what were the consequences? If the convicts rebelled, what kind of freedom did they want?

He thought of freedom that could strike shackles not only from his own feet but from the feet of all men everywhere. And he thought not only of shackles made of iron, but of others, invisible, which held men’s minds imprisoned.xi

The contending forces in these novels are not only the colonial powers and the government officials but also the convicts, the free settlers — and the women. History, Eleanor wrote in her essay on Chisholm, is usually the story of man; but she always looked for the way women and children were represented. She read about Aboriginal women, how they participated in their communities, and made one of the Aboriginal women in her novel, Warreweer, a song writer.

Her working title for The Timeless Land was Black Man’s Burden. The book begins with Bennilong on the headland with his father, remembering his first sight of the Europeans entering the harbour in their sailing ships. This was a radical way to start her novel; it meant she could look at the early settlement from the Aboriginal point of view, and compare and contrast the different social values. And she made her Phillip capable of seeing beyond the British point of view.

Am I to convince these people that it was necessary to steal their land from them? That it is necessary, having stolen it, to hunt their game, to haul nets in their waters? That it is necessary now to send an armed force against them? What is this necessity? The necessity for a distant jail in which to herd our criminals! The necessity for another colonial possession! The necessity for empire and dominion, for power and glory …xii

The historical characters, like Phillip, were a challenge for her. Dorothy Fitzpatrick was an interested reader and a perceptive critic of her novels.

I feel that if you were quite certain about these people you would let them out more often without their adjectives.xiii

But Dorothy found much to praise.

The adjustment of the Aboriginal to his environment (which you show extraordinarily well) throws into relief the weakness of the British social organisation more clearly than any description of those weaknesses could do.xiv

Eleanor finished The Timeless Land in 1940 and sent the manuscript to her English publishers. She was anxious that it might be burnt or blown up or something, for Collins’ London office was hit during an air raid, but her book was safe. She arranged for copies of it to be sent to Australian army camps in Britain and North Africa, and gave part of her English royalties to a fund for children in London affected by the war. The Timeless Land was published in the United States in September 1941; in December the United States would enter the war in the Pacific. When the Australian newspapers heard her novel was a Book Club Choice in the United States, she had newshounds on her trail. Modest, hard-working, attractive-looking Eleanor Dark, Smiths’ Weekly said, with one gigantic bound she goes to the top of the ladder in America … Australians know nothing about her. Her reputation abroad is higher than it is here in her home country.xv This was an exaggeration. She was well known in Australia, but avoided publicity. John Apthorp, later a close friend of Eric Dark, met her at this time: She was not shy, she was no shrinking violet, but she was a particularly private person, he said. She was calm, quiet, highly intelligent … a striking looking woman ….xvi

After finishing The Timeless Land she suffered from writer’s block; there was something about the waste and horror of the war that paralysed her. She broke through with a novel with a documentary element, The Little Company (1945), a portrait of the way the war affects a group of writers and intellectuals from a middle class family. In 1944 Eleanor began writing Storm of Time, and she was working on it during the optimistic period of postwar reconstruction. Before she finished it the Darks’ lives were changed when she and Eric were publicly, and wrongly, named as communists. In 1947 the cold war between the Soviet Union and the United States was at its height. In the United States, many writers were persecuted and lost their livelihood because they were believed to be communists. In May 1947 the Darks were both named in Federal Parliament, Eric as a secret member, and Eleanor as an underground supporter, of the Communist Party. Eric Dark, a militant socialist who maintained his independence, had been active in local politics. Now he received poison pen letters, making threats on his life. There was graffiti on the walls in Katoomba saying Lynch Communists!

In September, feeling distracted, she wrote, the book is floundering along with the end in sight now ….xvii She finished Storm of Time in December 1947. The Darks decided to take a holiday, and in 1948 they spent six months travelling around Australia. First they went north to Queensland, then west towards central Australia. Eric helped her correct the proofs of Storm of Time, which followed her around the country. They sat in a hotel in Mt Isa, in a room so square and yellow it reminded her of a pound of butter, rushing to have the proofs ready before the weekly mail plane left for Brisbane.

Storm of Time takes up the story in 1799 and continues until 1808. A big, sprawling novel, it moves between Sydney and the outlying settlements, between the governors — Hunter, King and Bligh — the convicts and the settlers, with occasional mention of the Aboriginal community. Her working title was Bright Beacon, of truth, or liberty; one of the convicts reads Tom Paine on the rights of man, on society as a blessing and government as a necessary evil. Dorothy Fitzpatrick said this book was a milestone in the popularisation of Australian history; Jean Devanny called it a lesson in the writing of propaganda. A successful historical novel, Dorothy Fitzpatrick said, should get further than the documents by showing the documented facts outlined in the light of strong feeling.xviii Your economic history is good, she wrote to Eleanor, but the book is heavily written and too close to the documents.

Eleanor began writing No Barrier, the last novel of the trilogy, in Katoomba in 1950. By the time she finished it, she and Eric had bought a farm in Queensland where they spent half of each year. Eric sold his medical practice while he still had one to sell, and they left behind the Katoomba winters and the rumours that persuaded Eric’s patients to shun him. They bought a farm at Montville, where their friend Eric Lowe was living and their son was working. Eleanor planted another garden, a subtropical one this time, and they grew citrus and macadamia nuts, experimenting with sustainable agriculture. She wrote No Barrier at the farm, in a whitewashed room with a window facing the sunrise and a bookcase made from fruit boxes.

Her working title for No Barrier was Land of Plunder; the idea of exploitation of the land, a theme that runs through all three of these novels, was strong in her mind.

You intend to exploit this land; have a care, Sir, that it does not end by exploiting you.xix

This relationship between the people and the country might be the real centre of the historical novels.

Every white man and woman in the community suffered the spiritual malaise of humanity uprooted — felt a curious sense of impermanence, of illusion, of drifting, as though they were ghosts, or clouds, or blown shreds of smoke between earth and sky. And so, resist it as they might, and cling as they would to memories of the soil from which they had been torn, they were obsessed with this unresponsive land.xx

Storm of Time and No Barrier continue to develop the ideas in The Timeless Land, but they were harder novels to integrate. In The Timeless Land the focus was on the first settlement. Bennilong and Phillip were representatives of two contending cultures to set against one another. In Storm of Time and No Barrier she had to deal with an expanding settlement, a diverse community, and complex political intrigues. She had used parallel narratives in her earlier novels, but here she had no single crisis to draw the threads together. The novels had to move between Sydney and the outlying settlements to show what was happening to the Aboriginal people. Her fictional characters, Johnny Prentice and the Mannions, made some of the connections. Prentice provided the link she needed between the convicts, the Aboriginal people, and the settlers. Conor Mannion provided the reflective consciousness. No Barrier begins with Conor Mannion reflecting on Stephen Mannion’s murder, and the fall of Bligh; it ends with Conor Mannion remarried, and the building of a road across the Blue Mountains.

Karl Shapiro, the American poet, had written to Eleanor about The Timeless Land in 1943.

The Timeless Land has left a wonderful flavour with me. It’s andante, acrid, blue, warm as sky, inwoven like tapestry, hung in the space of the Australian atmosphere, not quite tragic, wiser than nostalgia, full of peace … I imagine that after living in such a mood you find modern Australia with its American influence a bit rasping. Or do you?xxi

She did. She wanted not only to question but also to reinforce the sense of what it meant to be Australian, to make a stand against the American-based mass culture that she hated. It was a post-colonial nationalism she and her contemporaries had advocated, a progressive nationalism; but now, when she saw an independent nation becoming a kind of colony again, by choice, nationalism was thrown into question. The state of the country depressed her.

Eleanor Dark was born with the century in 1901, and she had always felt a special connection with the country through her family history. Now the optimism of the immediate postwar period had faded; the conservative backlash of the 1950s fragmented the connections they had all been trying to make. She felt both she and Eric had been marginalised, if not rejected. When they left Katoomba for Montville, she joked about feeling like a Displaced Person, the term used to describe the refugees who began to arrive in Australia during the war.

Looking back, it seems to me that her three novels did make a difference to the way we see ourselves. Eleanor had gained a wider readership for her novels; her contribution to Australian historiography was recognised. She saw the trilogy used in school broadcasts to encourage schoolchildren to imagine themselves in the position of the Aboriginal people when the First Fleet arrived. And she would make more money from these three than her other novels. But her morale was low when she finished No Barrier. She thought she had not been able to do what she set out to do, to change people’s minds.

When Helen Palmer wrote a thoughtful letter to her, in August 1953, Eleanor must have been pleased. Writer, school teacher and political activist, Helen Palmer was the daughter of Vance and Nettie Palmer, writers who had advocated the need for a sense of history in Australian writing. Thinking back over the three books, Helen Palmer wrote, made her realise

how immeasurably valuable to us all it is to have the period they cover imaginatively recreated in the terms you have established.

She went on to say, strange that the problems of the period seem too relevant and so little dated today ….xxii

Looking back at these three books reminds me how important Eleanor Dark is to us, as a writer and an independent thinker. It is our habit to conform to our society and our time, she said; but it’s only when we refuse to conform that we can change what needs to be changed. These are big books, but, after all, the idea of the country was a grand subject. Now we write histories — of women, ecology, Aboriginal people — teasing out the separate narrative threads; she wove the threads together. If her prose veers a little towards the epic and sonorous, we can forgive her because her story is entertaining and her sensitivity to issues we debate now is striking: our relationship with the environment, the question of indigenous rights. Her talk of stealing Aboriginal land reminds us how long this has been an unresolved debate. We can see elements of the romantic, and perhaps the patronising, in her portrayal of a lively and creative Aboriginal community. Aboriginal writers are telling their own side of the story now. But writers like Eleanor Dark helped to open the minds of a generation of readers to another point of view. She would say understanding comes through conflicting ideas; it is by looking at a question from different points of view that you find an answer.

BARBARA BROOKS

Sydney, June 2002

References

Introduction

to the 1990 Edition

By Humphrey McQueen

Eleanor Dark performed two miracles in the first forty pages of The Timeless Land. She first enlivened a day — 26 January 1788 — whose basic events were too well known to Australians. Then she encouraged her readers to see the landing of the First Fleet at Sydney in an entirely unexpected way, from the outlook of the Aborigines whom she shows as not at all surprised by the arrival of the Europeans, since the tribes had been looking forward to a return of the white ships that had sailed past almost twenty years before. In the aftermath of the Bicentenary, neither of these two achievements might sound as daring as they did fifty years ago when The Timeless Land first appeared and New South Wales had just celebrated its SesquiCentenary with an official story that turned its back on the convicts and ignored the destruction of Aboriginal society.

Intervening years have in no way lessened the appeal of the novel’s opening which, like Sydney Harbour itself, ceaselessly delights with its heartstopping capaciousness as much as with the idiosyncrasies of each cove and bay. The reader stands beside the young Bennilong on South Head, sharing his impatience for the return of the huge white boats about whose first visit his father had created one of the corroborees that had established his reputation as a great storyteller. Unbeknown to Phillip and his company, a place existed for them in Aboriginal cosmology before their fleet arrived at Botany Bay: they would come, stay for a few days and then go away again.

Dark’s treatment of the Aborigines has been criticised for making them appear too good, too noble, an opinion usually tied to this quotation from her Preface:

I have been able to discover no vices save those which they learned from the white invaders …

On the other hand, she is criticised sometimes for treating the Aborigines as little better than inquisitive monkeys or impulsive children. Speaking in her own voice she remained the prisoner of her times, more liberal-minded than most but still accepting the common sense of White Australia. To re-create the past she had to escape from these fetters so that the world she imagined was not governed by her articulated attitudes, but became a universe in which fictionalised figures behaved according to their several desires and logics. The action of the novel shows that the Aborigines did have vices before the Europeans came and their puzzling over the moral contrasts between their Law and those of the newcomers rises far above — yet others have complained too far above — the mental level of apes and infants. Character types are as diverse in her Blacks as in her Whites, with Bennilong standing out as that mixture of pride and generosity, energy and self-indulgence, courage and short-temper that guarantees the humanity of us all. If there is a weakly drawn portrait it is that of Phillip, who is a plaster saint, tormented in body and mind, but never stepping out of his rational character even when ordering a punitive mission against the Blacks who have killed his gamekeeper.

Dark’s earlier novels had prepared the way for the subject matter of The Timeless Land with its themes of class conflict, the subjugation of women, the spoliation of nature and the meaning of love. One surprise was in the form which expanded to survey several years whereas her previous novels had been contracting until the action of the preceding two had been contained within a single day. The conflict between European and Aboriginal civilisations is reproduced in the disjuncture between the title with its stress on timelessness and the division of her material into five chapters with one for each year from 1788 to 1792. The timelessness of the land was enclosed by the colonists and by the novelist.

A few recent commentators have claimed The Timeless Land for an SF tradition because the meeting of the two cultures was like the exploration of a different planet, with the Sirius and the Supply acting the part of Wellsian time machines, conveying hatchets instead of ray-guns, mirrors in place of holograms; in the Epilogue, Bennilong becomes the space-time traveller by going to England with Phillip. The Australian environment appears no more alien to the invaders than the atmosphere of Venus proved to be for fictional space travellers. Providing SF stands for Speculative Fiction there can be no quibbling with this suggestion since Dark was concerned with the future as much as with the past. When Governor Arthur Phillip looks forward from the mean and brutish prison camp at Port Jackson to envisage a free and prosperous community, Eleanor Dark is standing beside him seeking that same goal beyond the economic depression and war-making of the 1930s. His confidence presents her hope just as her doubts echo through his reverses.

While the outline story would have been known to most Australians, the task of writing Australian history had hardly begun in the late 1930s so that Dark had few secondary sources to call on and was obliged to become her own authority as she quoted freely from diaries, letters and reports read in the Mitchell Library. Most of the incidents and much of the texture of daily experience came from these primary sources, but she was not constrained by what was in the record or frightened to reorder events for dramatic purpose. Telling stories always provokes a conflict between the champions of accuracy and the promoters of truth, the former refusing to go beyond what can be footnoted and the latter asserting that experience and empathy compel us to take up questions which the records do not ask. Finding out what happened is one of the joys of historical investigation but the most complete chronology leaves us aching to know how it happened and why. The best writers, whether they call themselves novelists or historians, appreciate that they were not the first to ask such questions and that any half-way accurate reconstruction of the past requires the inclusion of open-ended problems. Phillip commences his administration by asking Why not? and Dark concludes her account of his years in the colony with a question to Bennilong: What is it that is dead? No archive warrants either of these queries yet they raise two of the most important matters relating to the first settlement.

Australians living in London in the 1930s said that reading an Eleanor Dark novel had the same effect on them as burning a handful of gum leaves in the open fireplace: sensuous memories of Australia overwhelmed them. This quality abounds in The Timeless Land, heightened by the Europeans’ encountering the bush for the first time so that their reactions provide a freshness for her descriptions of the landscape. At almost every moment, the newcomers feel lost in the bush, distances are deceptive, and insurmountable gullies lie between explorers and their destination. The conviction which Dark brings to this convention of writing about Australia grew out of her experience as a bushwalker, one of that circle around Paddy Pallin. A ten-metre sandstone cliff was no stage-prop for her prose but yet another barrier to be skirted during a weekend outing on the north shore before the bridge was built, or near her home in the Blue Mountains. The explicit call for the preservation of the environment in Sun Across the Sky (1937) is restated here as a bush benediction.

Several times Dark refers to the Land exerting its influence on the Europeans, adjusting and transforming them to its realities. As with her comments about the Aborigines, this geographic determinism is belied in the action of the novel where the Reverend Johnson and the escaped convict, Andrew Prentice, remake themselves by working the land. The power of the land is inert whereas human labour makes new men of more than James Ruse at Rose Hill. Dark intimates that this remaking will not be confined to individuals but that the earlier social order will be subject to the dictates of hard work and money-grubbing. The friendship between Johnny Prentice and Patrick Mannion, as well as the relations between the doubly abandoned Ellen Prentice and widowed Mannion senior, point to how the gentry of Australia will be self-made and not just to the manor born.

Between readers and books falls the shadow of literary reputation and so The Timeless Land has suffered from being a set text for schools, emerging with an accolade for worthiness. Far from being a comforting tale of nation-building, The Timeless Land is a subversive novel. If Phillip is its hero, then his refusal to eat more than the poorest and most damned of the convicts stands in sharp contrast to Australia’s leaders in the 1930s depression, for whom equality of sacrifice meant that millionaires and unemployed would each give up ten per cent of their income. Dark may not have been convinced that any of the alternative systems on offer would be perfect, but the contrasts she made between European and Aboriginal societies are indelible question marks over the sanctity of a social order in which poverty and war are part of its normal functioning.

Since Lolita and Lady Chatterley’s Lover became available in the 1960s, readers’ expectations on sexual matters have altered considerably, leaving many books published in the preceding century to appear as if their authors thought that babies were harvested in the cabbage patch. In her earlier works Dark had never been afraid to deal with sexual relations, but she knew from the experience of her fellow writers that censorship was becoming stricter and any slight indelicacy could be used to ban a novel whose social or political outlook gave offence. If the mechanics of sex are absent from The Timeless Land its insistent urges are present for every one except Arthur Phillip. She hints at homosexuality among the male convicts; to have gone further on that subject would have certainly brought down the censor’s pen.

Dark’s father, Dowell O’Reilly, had introduced a bill for women’s suffrage into the New South Wales parliament, considering himself a feminist, and his daughter’s first three novels focused on the woman question. The Timeless Land was too big a book to be confined to any one aspect of human life, and in it Dark’s concern for the position of women became one of her symphonic themes. Aboriginal women are shown as constantly on the receiving end of violence from their men. Though attempting no defence of this brutality, Dark brought out two contrasts with the treatment of women in the convict settlement: first, women there were liable to be knocked about as well as flogged, a punishment more calculating and cruel than almost any ill-treatment inflicted on Aboriginal women; secondly, Aboriginal women found support in the other women of their clans whereas European women were mostly left to suffer alone. When Andrew Prentice takes an Aboriginal wife and builds a hut with a lock on the door to keep her and their child away from everybody else, Dark was mocking the creation of the suburban isolation that had spread through Australian life by the 1930s. Yet there is no doubt that the world of The Timeless Land is dominated by men; sharply drawn though several women characters are, none occupies centre stage. Briefly, Carangarang, Bennilong’s sister, demonstrates her independence of mind by displaying a talent for storytelling but Dark allows this tribal equivalent of her own role as novelist to fade from view.

If by some mishap you have read this introduction before beginning Dark’s book perhaps you will not mind a further piece of advice: don’t read the Preface or the Epilogue as part of The Timeless Land. The former sets up too many prejudices that are not borne out in the novel, while the latter is a rickety bridge to the next volume in the trilogy and better kept as preparation for Storm of Time.

Flawed masterpiece is a phrase applied to every great novel from War and Peace down. If no fiction is flawless, perhaps critics should ask what is the positive contribution of flaws to successful novel writing? Yet flawed masterpiece is not appropriate to The Timeless Land which has blemishes on its surface rather than flaws in its structure. Those blemishes, such as the insertion of a piece of hindsight, could have been removed by a sympathetic editor in 1940. Every weak spot is outshone by thrilling strokes like the flash where the Aborigines suppose that Bennilong will challenge Phillip to a fight. Fifty years later, the blemishes are barely noticeable among the push and pull of Dark’s characters, incidents, ideas and descriptions, so many of which stayed in my memory across the ten years since I last enjoyed them. Remaking their acquaintance has left me looking forward to meeting them again.

HUMPHREY McQUEEN

Tokyo, 1990

Preface

This book has borrowed so much from history that it seems advisable to remind readers that it is fiction. My aim has been to give a picture of the first settlement of Sydney, which is always true in broad outline, and often in detail, but I make no claim to strict historical accuracy either in my dealings with the white men or the black. With regard to the latter, strict accuracy would be hardly possible. There are many accounts of these people in the journals of those who came to Australia with the First Fleet; but as was inevitable between races unacquainted with each other’s languages and unfitted to appreciate the significance of each other’s customs, there were constant misunderstandings, and in the light of research which has been made in more recent years, one is bound to regard some of their statements with suspicion. That they recorded faithfully what they saw cannot be questioned; that they placed the correct interpretation upon it is not so certain. The Aborigines, too, have a strongly developed sense of humour, and one cannot help suspecting that the early colonists had their legs frequently and diligently pulled.

Of the tribes which lived on the shores of Port Jackson at the time of the white men’s arrival, less is known than of almost any other tribes, for the obvious reason that, being the first to mingle with the invaders, they were the first to disintegrate, and die out. Therefore, where I have wanted to introduce songs, words, legends, customs, for which I have been able to find no record for these particular groups, I have borrowed shamelessly from other tribes, often far distant. The result, from an ethnologist’s point of view, must be quite horrible; but I am not really very repentant. These people were all of one race, and it is the quality of the race which I have tried to suggest, without regard to minor tribal differences. The important thing has seemed to me to be that these were the kind of songs they sang, the kind of legends they loved, the kind of customs and beliefs by which they ordered their lives.

A great deal of research has been done among them, and many books have been written to describe their way of life. What I have read has only served to make me increasingly conscious of my abysmal ignorance, and I must emphatically insist that my portrayal is not intended to be taken too literally. Many intensely important aspects of tribal life have been touched upon lightly, or left out altogether. The question of native religion, in particular, has been here enormously oversimplified; to treat it fully (even if I felt myself qualified to do so) would have left no room in the book for anything else. The belief in the existence of a Supreme Being is vouched for by many authorities, as is also the belief that after death the spirit passes to the sky — but these are mere fragments of a huge and complicated structure of spiritual belief, embracing the mythology which is, in a sense, the history-book of the aborigine, keeping him in touch with the eternal dream-time, the unseen world from which he came, and to which he hopes to return.

Certain mistakes made by the colonists when they were first learning the meanings of aboriginal words have been ignored, as they would only be confusing here. In some cases I have deliberately used an incorrect word simply because it has become the familiar one — as, for instance, birrahlee, and kangaroo. Kangaroo was a word quite unknown to the Port Jackson natives, being one which Captain Cook had learned from the Queensland tribes, and they naturally assumed it was a white man’s word. Indeed, Tench records that one of them, upon first seeing cattle, inquired whether these were kangaroos?

The beautiful lament which I have borrowed for the occasion of Barangaroo’s death belongs by right, I believe, to a Western Australian tribe.

Among the native characters many are historical, Bennilong being, of course, the best known of them; the eastern point of Sydney Cove, upon which Governor Phillip built him his hut in 1790, is still called Bennilong Point. It will be obvious that my account of his life before the arrival of the First Fleet must be purely imaginary; after its arrival I have stuck to facts, but interpreted them freely. Booron, Nanbarree, Colbee, Caruey, Arabanoo, Barangaroo, Ballederry, Gooroobarooboolo, and several others are historical figures. Tirrawuul, Wunbula, and Cunnembeillee are imaginary.

The Australian Aboriginal had great virtues; in a fairly extensive reading I have been able to discover no vices save those which they learned from the white invaders of their land. Some of their customs seemed cruel to us. Some of ours, such as flogging, horrified them. The race is nearly gone, and with it will go something which the civilised world has scorned too easily. I do not want to be taken for a back-to-nature advocate, nor for one who, in these disillusioned times, regards our own civilisation as inevitably doomed; but I do believe that we, nine-tenths of whose progress has been a mere elaboration and improvement of the technique, as opposed to the art of living, might have learned much from a people who, whatever they may have lacked in technique, had developed that art to a very high degree. Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness — to us a wistful phrase, describing a far-away goal — sums up what was, to them, a taken-for-granted condition of their existence.

With regard to the white men and their doings there has been little need to embroider. The difficulty has been, rather, to choose and eliminate from the embarras de richesse which is available in the early records of the colony. The characters of many of the officers are to be discovered between the lines of their journals and letters; I have tried to portray them as I found them there, realising that another student of those same documents might find quite different men. It is not easy to catch more than a glimpse here and there of Arthur Phillip the man in the voluminous dispatches and correspondence of Arthur Phillip the Governor. The comments of his contemporaries shed a little light — his actions and the results of his actions more still. Certain qualities appear too obviously to be questioned — physical courage and endurance, moral fortitude, a struggling humanitarianism, and a streak of illogical faith. Upon these qualities I have built what must be regarded merely as my own conception of the founder of Australia.

Where letters have been used they are quotations from genuine documents. The Prentice family and the Mannion family are entirely imaginary.

ELEANOR DARK

Katoomba

July 29th, 1940

PART I

– 1788 –

1788

Bennilong and his father had come down to the cliffs again, alone. It was quite a long way from the place where the tribe was camped, and they had set out early in the morning when the heat of the midsummer day was only a threat, and the spider-webs across their path were still glimmering with dew. Now it was after noon, and though Bennilong was six, and expected to bear himself like a man, he was tired and sleepy and a little cross, and he sat in the shade of a rock with his copper-coloured legs thrust out in front of him, and his fingers idly making curly marks in the thin, hot sand. His head was bent, his lower lip protruded, his dark, liquid eyes were sulky. And yet, although this sleepiness, this crossness lay upon his spirit like a weight, he had a sense, too, of a larger contentment which included it, and made it trivial. He was conscious of the world, and conscious of himself as a part of it, fitting into it, belonging to it, drawing strength and joy and existence from it, like a bee in the frothing yellow opulence of the wattle. He was conscious of an order which had never failed him, of an environment which had never startled or betrayed him, of noises such as the chorus of the cicadas, less a sound than a vibration on his eardrums, of scents which he had drawn into his nostrils with his first breath, and of the familiar, scratchy touch against his bare skin of sand and twig, pebble and armoured leaf. So that his sulkiness remained isolated in a mind abandoned to sensation — something which, for the present, would go no farther than the outthrust lip and the liquid darkness of the eye, while he absorbed, in absent-minded voluptuousness, his secure and all-sufficient world.

The sky was very blue; there was not a cloud in it. The sea joined it in a silver line, incredibly far away, and there was the noise of surf breaking on the rocks at the foot of the cliff. But these were not things to be thought about, or even to be noticed very much. They were so, they were eternal, unquestionable, like the tribe, like the moon, like Gnambucootchaly the evil spirit. An ant dragging a dead fly laboured tremendously, backward, up the smooth, overhanging curve of Bennilong’s leg. He watched it solemnly, finding that by contracting his muscles he could impede its progress; and then suddenly he became aware that it tickled him, and killed it fiercely with a blow of his palm. The smell of it, hot and pungent, reached his nostrils, and he held his hand before his nose, sniffing, until he decided that he did not like it, and the small flicker of sensuous revulsion released his mood, and filled him with the formless resentment of over-wearied childhood. A tear overflowed and slid down his cheek. He knew that if his mother had been there she would have understood that he was tired. She would have gathered him against her breast, scolding and soothing him with familiar words. Woram-woram buna, she would have said, worambil moium. But his father did not notice. Bennilong, from beneath his lashes, stole an upward glance at the motionless figure standing upon the rock in whose shade he rested, looking at the long, tireless legs, the broad chest, the upflung head with its matted hair and beard, the muscles standing out along the arm which held the shield and spear; and for a moment his gaze was held and his eyes dried, studying the grace and the strength and the pride of a man who had never known physical or spiritual humiliation.

Wunbula stood quite still. A darkly shining silhouette against the blue sky, nothing moved but his hair and his beard, blowing in the sharp sea wind. The light struck downward on to his forehead and his cheek bones making them gleam softly like unpolished bronze, and his eyes, narrowed to slits in the dark caverns beneath his brows, gazed out over the glare of the ocean, searching the horizon.

Thus reminded of the object of their journey, Bennilong’s gusty sense of grievance faded once again before more absorbing thoughts. His father had not noticed that he was tired. His father had forgotten him. His father was watching for the boat with wings.

For long ago — a whole season ago, when the days were growing shorter, and one crept close to the fire at night, and left the ’possum rugs reluctantly in the morning — a strange thing had happened. Wunbula had gone with other warriors of the tribe to attend a ceremony in the towri of the Gweagal, who dwelt on the southern shore of another great harbour a little farther down the coast. It was an important ceremony, whose attendant celebrations would last for several days, and at all important ceremonies the presence of Wunbula was held to be indispensable. For he was not only justly famed as a warrior and a hunter, but he was also acknowledged to be the greatest youara-gurrugin of his own or any other neighbouring tribe. Not even the Cammeraygal, proud and haughty and numerous as they were, could boast a maker of corroborees to vie with Wunbula.

Sometimes when the mood for making a song came upon him, he would go away by himself, or sit apart, silent and brooding, and Bennilong knew better than to tease him at such times for stories, or to be tossed in the air by his strong arms. And then suddenly words would come from his lips — wonderful words of celebration, battle, or death; words filled with the gaiety of feasts, or the wild triumph of victory, or the long wailing for the dead. Or with another element, dimly sad and yet compelling, stirring the heart, but whether with pride or sorrow his hearers hardly knew.

So Wunbula had gone to the towri of the Gweagal, and joined in their dances and songs, and made an entirely new and very magnificent corroboree for the occasion. But one morning when he had set out with his hosts upon a kangaroo-hunt, he had realised that the mood for hunting was not upon him, and he had left the others and gone alone to the sea cliffs. His companions had watched him go, nodding their approval, for they understood that the words of a great youara-gurrugin come to him most easily in solitude.

But after all no words had come to Wunbula that day. For he had been only a few moments on the cliffs when he had seen something which made his heart leap in his chest, and his pulses hammer with excitement. It was a magic boat. At first only a drift of white to his far-sighted eyes, he saw it come out of the south, and he was afraid, believing it to be a spirit sent by Turong, who rules the water; and he had crouched behind a rock watching it come nearer and nearer until he saw that it was in the likeness of a boat, but that it had great white wings which bore it along over the ocean like a bird. Fear was still strong in him, but stronger still was that quality which had made him a maker of songs, and he had felt himself shaken and enraptured by the beauty of this marvel, by the grace of its movement, and the billowy curves of its wings. He had stared and stared hungrily while it passed, and then, fearful of losing sight of it for ever, he had leapt to his feet and hurried along the cliffs. But gullies and indentations had so delayed him that it was soon out of sight, vanished around a headland. Presently he had fallen in with the hunting party, and he had told them, wide-eyed, what he had seen. At first they had stared — then laughed — then stared again, but finally they followed him, and when they reached the camp they had found it seething with excitement. For the magic boat had flown into their harbour, and, folding its wings like a seagull, had come to rest.

There it was. There for many days it had remained, and from it had come, in a smaller boat, mysterious beings with faces pale as bones, who spoke an incomprehensible language, and wore coverings not only all over their bodies, but even upon their heads and feet.

All this Bennilong knew because it was all in the corroboree which his father had made to tell of it — the famous Corroboree of the Bereewolgal — which had been several times performed since by his own and other tribes.

And then, as suddenly as they had come, the strangers had departed. One morning quite early, when the creamy film of fog was just lifting from the bay, their boat had spread its wings again, and made for the open sea. Wunbula was home again in his own towri by that time, but it had so happened that about midday, standing upon these same rocks where he stood now, he had seen it pass, making northward up the coast, and he had stood straining his eyes after it until it vanished.

That same afternoon, Bennilong remembered, when his father had left the camp, he had followed at a respectful distance, for he had guessed that Wunbula was going to the flat rock to make images, and he dearly loved to watch this work, though he knew that he was not welcome at such times unless he sat very still and asked but few questions. So he had crept up to find his father already arrived at the great stretch of smooth, flat sandstone, half covered with the things he had made — a huge fish, an emu, very fine and tall, many shields and boomerangs; but best of all, the whole story of a hunt, showing the two kangaroos with the spears of the hunters in their sides, and the hunters themselves with their arms upflung in triumph.

Wunbula, squatting on his haunches with his bit of sharp flint in his hand, was so still that if Bennilong had not been able to see the bright eyes, fixed and intent beneath their frowning brows, he might have thought him dozing. After a time he began to work, and the sound of the flint, chip, chip, chip, on the rock was so monotonous that Bennilong had fallen asleep, and had not awakened until the shadows were long, and he was beginning to feel cold. Wunbula was still there, but now his head was bent and his hands hung idly, and he looked so full of sorrow that Bennilong sidled up to him curiously and looked over his shoulder. There was the winged boat. Wunbula had made it quite large — larger than anything he had ever made before, except the whale-feast which had covered the whole of a big rock. It was indeed a very strange-looking boat, Bennilong thought, for it had no paddles, and no men were to be seen in it. He breathed admiringly: How fine it is! But Wunbula only shook his head.

That was long ago. The tribe did not bother about the magic boat now. Except when the Corroboree of the Bereewolgal was performed they never thought about it. It was gone. It had never been important to them in any case; it had not touched their lives for more than a few days, nor disturbed the centuries-old rhythm of their existence. Only Wunbula remembered it, and so often now that he had lost count, Bennilong had come with him to the high cliffs of Burrawarra to watch for it. Between them there was a faith unspoken; the winged boat would return.

Yet Bennilong’s thoughts of it were different from his father’s thoughts. He had not seen it, as Wunbula had, swinging and lifting gallantly over the long swell of the sea, with its wings painted golden by the sunlight, and the little plume of spray at its bows. His thought was that if these beings, these Bereewolgal, could make such a boat, could not he, Bennilong, when he was older, do the same, and so journey across the water out of sight of his own land, as (until this thing had happened) he had believed that no man could go, and live.

For of course every child in the tribe knew the tale of

Reviews for The Timeless Land

[therebelprince · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Almost earned five stars. Dark was an exquisite writer and her fictional retelling of the key moments in Australia's history, from the days when our first peoples "Saw the tall ships come" remains compelling after many decades.

[Mina Arsanious · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Truly exceptional writing. Though the topic was inevitably wrapped up in sorrow she brings great humanity to the cast of characters. Anyone looking to understand the Australian spirit needs to read this book

[ninieb-1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

The Timeless Land is the best kind of historical fiction. It meets the inhabitants of that time on their own terms, portraying the attitudes and personalities appropriately to the era. Dark also manages to present the natives (and the settlers) as real people with three-dimensional characters. I’m really looking forward to the next book in the trilogy.