Abstract
This chapter explores history, ethics and conservation in the context of the settler colonial metropolis. Intensively focused on relations between the city, the harbour and its people, Waterway rails against what Dark identifies as the political, ethical and ecological failings of Australian urban modernity. Dark uses a modernist single-day form and multi-perspectival narration to track her characters as they cross paths in the city and on the water. This fluid spatiality is paired with fluid temporality: memory and history circulate and commingle; past, present and future flow together, informing and augmenting each other. The novel ends with shipwreck on Sydney Harbour, and this chapter explores the event as a temporal and ideological fissure that complicates and exceeds the novel’s model of settler colonial ethics.
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Notes
- 1.
Jane Bennett’s work is compelling in this regard. In Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (2010), Bennett draws on what she calls the ‘critical’ or ‘modern’ vitalisms of Henri Bergson and Hans Driesch to develop the concept of ‘vital materialism’, an understanding of the independent, dynamic autonomy of matter as a political force (63, xviii).
- 2.
See, for instance, Michael Roe’s Nine Australian Progressives: Vitalism in Bourgeois Social Thought, 1890–1960 (1984), and Body Culture: Max Dupain, Photography and Australian Culture, 1919–1939 (2004), by Isobel Crombie.
- 3.
In a 2003 thesis, Pamela Bell argues that Dark’s ideas about artistic striving share the sensibility of Jack and Norman Lindsay’s short-lived Sydney magazine, Vision (1923–24). I would say Dark would have had little sympathy for Norman Lindsay’s love of wood nymphs and satyrs.
- 4.
See Michael Roe, Nine Progressive Australians, chapter 8, and Ann Curthoys, ‘Piddington, Marion Louisa (1869–1950)’.
- 5.
Melinda J. Cooper has recently explored the classed and racialised complexities of Dark’s relationship with eugenics discourse in ‘“A Masterpiece of Camouflage”: Modernism and Interwar Australia’ (2020).
- 6.
Brennan was a friend of the O’Reilly family, and in Waterway’s prequel, Sun Across the Sky (1936), the eccentric poet Kavanagh is modelled on Brennan. Dark’s relationship with Lawrence was more combative: in Waterway, Lesley chides herself for ‘going all D. H. Lawrence’ when musing on an attraction to the rich Sim Hegarty that she finds both undeniable and inexplicable (204). In her 1944 essay ‘Australia and the Australians’, Dark criticised Kangaroo (1923) as ‘one long, tormented attempt to see’, but in an essay championing the cause of national culture Dark may have had an ulterior motive in questioning the Englishman’s vision of Australia (13). Nevertheless, as we saw in the previous chapter with Cusack and Jungfrau, Lawrence’s philosophical ideas were part of the Australian intellectual zeitgeist at the time, and there seems little doubt that Dark was influenced by them.
- 7.
Toby Davidson (2011) has examined the various manifestations of mysticism in early Australian poetry, in ‘Frameworks of the Mystical in Australian Colonial and Post-Federation Poetry’, among other articles.
- 8.
Winifred most likely references the Blue Gum campaign of the early 1930s, one of the first conservationist movements in Australia. Dark and her husband Eric were involved in the campaign (Carson 1998: 191).
- 9.
This is perhaps a deliberate echo of Barnard Eldershaw’s criticism of Dark’s own work as ‘carefully constructed … every phrase […] a brick in the scientifically planned and erected edifice’ (1938: 189). For a compelling account of the relationship between the three writers and its impact on their respective work, see Ian Saunders (2002).
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Brayshaw, M. (2021). Ecology, Urban Ethics and the Harbour: Eleanor Dark’s Waterway (1938). In: Sydney and Its Waterway in Australian Literary Modernism. Literary Urban Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-64426-0_4
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