Sydney and Its Waterway in Australian Literary Modernism (Literary Urban Studies) 3030644251, 9783030644253

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LITERARY URBAN STUDIES

Sydney and Its Waterway in Australian Literary Modernism Meg Brayshaw

Literary Urban Studies

Series Editors Lieven Ameel Turku Institute for Advanced Studies University of Turku Turku, Finland Jason Finch English Language and Literature Åbo Akademi University Turku, Finland Eric Prieto Department of French and Italian University of California Santa Barbara, CA, USA Markku Salmela English Language, Literature & Translation Tampere University Tampere, Finland

The Literary Urban Studies Series has a thematic focus on literary mediations and representations of urban conditions. Its specific interest is in developing interdisciplinary methodological approaches to the study of literary cities. Echoing the Russian formalist interest in literaturnost or literariness, Literary Urban Studies will emphasize the “citiness” of its study object—the elements that are specific to the city and the urban condition—and an awareness of what this brings to the source material and what it implies in terms of methodological avenues of inquiry. The series’ focus allows for the inclusion of perspectives from related fields such as urban history, urban planning, and cultural geography. The series sets no restrictions on period, genre, medium, language, or region of the source material. Interdisciplinary in approach and global in range, the series actively commissions and solicits works that can speak to an international and cross-disciplinary audience. Editorial Board Ulrike Zitzlsperger, University of Exeter, UK Peta Mitchell, University of Queensland, Australia Marc Brosseau, University of Ottawa, Canada Andrew Thacker, De Montfort University, UK Patrice Nganang, Stony Brook University, USA Bart Keunen, University of Ghent, Belgium

More information about this series at http://www.palgrave.com/gp/series/15888

Meg Brayshaw

Sydney and Its Waterway in Australian Literary Modernism

Meg Brayshaw University of Sydney Sydney, NSW, Australia

ISSN 2523-7888 ISSN 2523-7896 (electronic) Literary Urban Studies ISBN 978-3-030-64425-3 ISBN 978-3-030-64426-0 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-64426-0 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover credit: Prasit photo/Getty Images This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

Map of the wharf accommodation of the Port of Sydney. Sydney: McCarron, Stewart & Co., Printers and Lithographers, 1913. National Library of Australia

Acknowledgments

This book has its origins in doctoral study undertaken at the Writing and Society Research Centre, Western Sydney University. My first thanks go to my supervisor, Professor Gail Jones, without whose careful reading and intellectually rigorous assessment this book would not exist. I also extend warm thanks to Dr. Anne Jamison and Dr. Lorraine Sim for their guidance. Part of this project was completed at the National Library of Australia, with the support of a McCann Fellowship. I thank the McCann family and the staff of the Library for this opportunity. I thank Professor Nicole Moore and Dr. Fiona Morrison for their comprehensive and thoughtful feedback on what would become the bones of this book. Dr. Melinda Cooper, Dr. Jasmin Kelaita and Dr. Julieanne Lamond all read various chapters and made them better for it. Associate Professor Brigid Rooney provided much needed support at a crucial moment in the book’s development, and I thank her for this generosity. I am grateful to Dr. Liliana Zavaglia for conversations about Australian literature, the work of literary criticism, and various other inexplicable quandaries that subsequently made their way into this book. Thanks also to the three anonymous reviewers who read and provided meaningful comments on the manuscript, and to Rachel Jacobe at Palgrave for guiding it to publication. Finally, for their support in the roughest waters, I thank my parents, Lyn and Max Brayshaw.

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Contents

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Introduction: Writing a City Built on Water

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The Origins of Australian Urban Modernity: Christina Stead’s Seven Poor Men of Sydney (1934)

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Science, Everyday Experience and Modern Urban Women: Dymphna Cusack’s Jungfrau (1936)

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Ecology, Urban Ethics and the Harbour: Eleanor Dark’s Waterway (1938)

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Plans, Porosity and the Possibilities of Urban Narrative: Kylie Tennant’s Foveaux (1939)

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The End of the City: M. Barnard Eldershaw’s Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow (1947; 1983)

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Conclusion: Sydney then and Now

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Index

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List of Figures

Fig. 1.1

Fig. 1.2 Fig. 5.1

Purvis, Tom. ‘Australia’s 150th anniversary celebrations Sydney—summer season—January to April 1938’. Issued on behalf of Australia’s 150th anniversary Council by the Australian National Travel Association. State Library of New South Wales Stead, Christina. Seven Poor Men of Sydney. London: Peter Davies, 1934 City of Sydney. ‘Terraces, Irving St (2-4-6-8), Chippendale’. Demolition Books, NSCA CRS 51/591. City of Sydney Archives. https://archives.cityofsydney.nsw. gov.au/nodes/view/1725833

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CHAPTER 1

Introduction: Writing a City Built on Water

[W]e are well aware that the cities which are most resistant to signification and which incidentally often present difficulties of adaptation for the inhabitants are precisely the cities without water, the cities without seashore, without a surface of water, without a lake, without a river, without a stream: all these cities present difficulties of life, of legibility. Roland Barthes, ‘Semiology and the Urban’ (1997: 416)

Sydney has never lost awareness of her harbour. The shores have changed greatly in a hundred and sixty years. They are encrusted with buildings, the stony and precipitous growth of a city, the installations of a port, the barnacle thick dwellings of Woolloomooloo, the cascading red roofs of suburbia, or white walls and old stone amid the dark masses of trees; docks and oil tanks and silos, churches and convents; lighthouses and reservoirs … Streets like tributaries trickle down the steep slopes to the water. The skyline is resculptured by the uncoordinated creativeness of man. The harbour lies in the lap of the city. The water is still the same, as blue. Marjorie Barnard, The Sydney Book (1947: 11)

In an evocative poster commissioned by the Australian National Travel Association (ANTA) and designed by Tom Purvis for the Sesquicentenary celebrations of 1938, a male figure with chiselled, European features rises up from Sydney harbour (Fig. 1.1). With his right index finger raised, © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 M. Brayshaw, Sydney and Its Waterway in Australian Literary Modernism, Literary Urban Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-64426-0_1

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Fig. 1.1 Purvis, Tom. ‘Australia’s 150th anniversary celebrations Sydney— summer season—January to April 1938’. Issued on behalf of Australia’s 150th anniversary Council by the Australian National Travel Association. State Library of New South Wales

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the figure beckons the viewer into a bright blue future beyond the newly opened Harbour Bridge, which stretches across the poster in black and orange silhouette. Intended for distribution by ANTA offices in London, Los Angeles, Tokyo, Shanghai, Paris and Cairo, among other exotic locales, the poster speaks to white Australian masculinity and fitness, and the nation’s achievements in technology and infrastructure. Through its seamless integration of body and landscape, the image shows how these qualities have allowed the nation to wrangle an environment that seemed so unforgiving to the invaders one hundred and fifty years previously. Purvis’s design captures a moment of national self-reflection between the two world wars, when Sydney was marketed to the world as an emergent modern metropolis. Just four years before the Sesquicentenary, Christina Stead’s novel Seven Poor Men of Sydney (1934) was published by the London firm of Peter Davies. I would like to entertain for a moment a comparison between Purvis’ poster and the first edition jacket of Stead’s book, considering them as two design objects of similar provenance but vastly different perspective. The jacket, by an unknown designer, features a sandcoloured background overlayed with diffractive blue lines moving like waves beneath the title and author’s name (Fig. 1.2). There is no order to these lines; they are randomly dispersed across the cover, resembling marks left upon the shore by the outgoing tide or the contour lines of a topographical map. The lines are actually produced from an accumulation of tiny dots and dashes, evoking the notion of wave-particle duality, of the ‘two contradictory pictures of reality’ popularised in the wake of Albert Einstein’s work on general relativity (cited in Watson 2016: 191). The dust jacket is quintessentially modernist, appropriate for what can be considered the first modernist novel of Australia. The two objects, poster and dust jacket, reflect their subject, Sydney, in very different ways. The former is designed to market the city to the world; the latter represents a narrative that, according to The Newcastle Sun, may ‘not please’ readers with the suggest that ‘everything is not for the best in the best of all possible continents’ (1934: 11). The poster has its origins in a state-sponsored, national tourist campaign; the jacket belongs to a Sydney book produced across three continents by a young, expatriate woman writer and published in London. Both summon the familiar correlation of Sydney with water; yet as Ivan Illich reminds us, water has ‘a nearly unlimited ability to carry metaphors’, but is always ambiguous, two-sided, ‘a shifting mirror’ (1985: 24–25). In Purvis’s

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Fig. 1.2 Stead, Christina. Seven Poor Men of Sydney. London: Peter Davies, 1934

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poster, the vector lines suggest the blue man has made and is in control of the blue environment. The Bridge spans the frame as a symbol of modernity’s technological domination of nature. The Stead cover moves closer to the water; it reorients perspective. Its pattern of breaking waves suggests a more speculative and unpredictable energy. Seen from the air or on a topographical map, the Sydney estuary branches like veins and capillaries from the city on its shores deep into the suburbs. It functions as a kind of symbolic life force, compensating for a city that has been thought formless and without history (Marshall 2001: 18). Sydney is an ‘accidental’ metropolis: wishing to avoid the troubles of the industrial, post-enclosures cities of his own nation, Phillip’s plan was for a ‘simple agrarian colony’ called ‘Albion’ (Karskens 2009: 72). Though attempts were made to formalise the burgeoning settlement, for many years Sydney expanded largely at the behest of private developers and without much government oversight. Today, Greater Sydney sprawls more than one hundred kilometres west of the Central Business District. The waterway has always provided this haphazard, amorphous city with a cohesive identity. Port Jackson, as the Sydney estuary is commonly known, is one of the largest in the world. From Sydney Harbour it flows up into Middle Harbour and south-western into the Lane Cove and Parramatta Rivers. Formed when the ocean rose up six thousand years ago and flooded the valley, the estuary gets its distinctively sinuous shape from its many bays and inlets, and its mix of sandy beaches and outcrops of Hawkesbury sandstone (Birch 2007: 216–17). For thousands of years, Aboriginal peoples have lived close to the water. The Sydney metropolitan area is home to more than twenty clan groups, known collectively by the settlerendowed name ‘Eora’, a word meaning ‘people from here’ (Attenbrow 2010: 24–26; Foley and Read 2020: 8–9). Sydney Cove is the unceded territory of the Cadigal (Gadigal) and Wangal clans, North Head of the Gai-mariagal people (Foley and Read 2020: 15, 9–10; Attenbrow 2010: 24–26). The Cove—Warrane—was a place of culture and industry for the Sydney clans, for meeting, ceremony and the making and perfecting of fishing equipment (Foley and Read 2020: 13–14). All along the shoreline there are rock engravings telling Eora stories—stories of fish and whales, kangaroos and boomerangs, humans and turtles (Derricourt 2010: 31). The story of how the penal colony of New South Wales happened to be established at Warrane in 1788 is part of settler mythology. Arriving in Botany Bay, Governor Arthur Philip found little to recommend the

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exposed, shallow location (Cathcart 2009: 11). He took a small crew and travelled north to an opening that Cook had noted but not entered ten years before. There Phillip found what the First Fleet’s Surgeon-General, John White, called ‘without exception, the finest and most extensive harbour in the universe’ (2003). ‘Here a Thousand Sail of the Line may ride in the most perfect Security’, Phillip wrote back to Britain (Karskens 2009: 62). The estuary was for the English a ‘semiotic tabula rasa’, and they quickly filled it with the ‘modern imperial culture’ they brought with them (Ryan 1996: 105; Matthews 2005: 13). This was a culture underpinned by Enlightenment conviction that commercial empire was a progressive model of human sociality ‘fundamentally in accord with nature itself, for the so-called trade winds make oceanic contact possible’ (Muthu 2012: 203). Sydney, as Phillip named the small waterside settlement, was immediately integrated into the global network of colonial capitalism through ocean trade (Matthews 2005: 17–18). By the late 1920s, Sydney Harbour was firmly established as the aesthetic and geopolitical locus of an emergent Australian modernity. Artists like Grace Cossington Smith, Roy de Maistre and Dorrit Black undertook the modernist colour experiments that would later become distinctive enough to warrant a title: the ‘Sydney Moderns’. Art historians Deborah Edwards and Denise Mimmocchi suggest that these artists’ distinctively luminous colour and bold shapes were inspired by their ‘close proximity to Sydney’s light-filled harbour’ (2013: 13). As the site of British settlement and the nation’s main link to the wider world, the waterway represented both the past and future of the city’s civic identity. Early on the morning of 26 January 1938, crowds gathered to watch long-boats with a full complement of red-coated marines recreate Phillip’s landing of one hundred and fifty years’ previous. A small group of Aboriginal people were recruited to stand and watch in mute fascination as the Governor came ashore. From there, this settler colonial teleology was completed with a ‘march to nationhood’, in which floats representing the country’s social and industrial achievements travelled through the city streets.1 Here, the harbour served as the fons et origo of triumphant white modernity. Today, the waterway is strangely doubled. By the 1960s, most of the shipping industry had moved to Botany Bay, and since 1958 the

1 Photographs and descriptions of the parade can be seen in The Home 18, no 3 (1938).

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contentious Cahill Expressway has cut through the city and limited its connection to the waterfront. Tourists come, but very few Sydneysiders can afford to live anywhere near the water, which after two centuries of settlement is now one of the most contaminated bodies of water in the world (Mayer-Pinto et al. 2015: 1091). Yet, the myth of the ‘finest harbour in the universe’ persists. In his recent work of narrative nonfiction, The Harbour (2017), Scott Bevan calls the waterway the ‘city’s heart’ and the ‘country’s soul’. On the first page alone, Bevan associates the harbour with belonging, desire, longing, safety and shelter (1). Sydney still understands itself, geographically and symbolically, ‘built on water’ (Barnard 1947: 6). No wonder, then, that the city’s logo is an anchor. This book explores the myth and the reality of Sydney’s connection to its waterway through close examination of literary representations produced in the years between the wars, a period of rapid civic development and cultural change in the city. It is arranged as case studies of five exemplary novels written by women and published between 1934 and 1947: Christina Stead’s Seven Poor Men of Sydney (1934), Dymphna Cusack’s Jungfrau (1936), Waterway (1938) by Eleanor Dark, Foveaux (1939) by Kylie Tennant, and Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow (1947; 1983) by Marjorie Barnard and Flora Eldershaw, writing as M. Barnard Eldershaw. Each case study offers in-depth analysis of the works’ formal and aesthetic innovations in the context of global urban and modernist literatures, while also positioning each novel as an anchor point for broader exploration of various literary, cultural and social currents that flowed through Sydney at the time. Vastly different in tone, form and purpose, the five novels all share an interest in the complexities of urban modernity, and in the conceptual, formal and aesthetic possibilities of writing the city through water. The writers chart their imagined Sydney according to the topography of the estuary. Writes Eleanor Dark in Waterway: More than once upon her expeditions about the city and its suburbs she had felt a sudden started recognition of its ubiquitousness; down there near the Heads, she thought, you lived at its very source, but when your tram or bus plunged out from between some tangle of shops or houses in Mosman or Cremorne, a glimpse of it below you took you by surprise. … [Y]ou were always meeting it somewhere, crossing it by one bridge or another; you had seen it from the window of a cottage in Middle Harbour, from the top of some dingy street in Woolloomooloo, from the roof of flats

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in Darlinghurst, from the balcony of a house in Drummoyne. (Dark 1990: 188)

For Dark, the waterway is ‘vitally a part of the city … entangled in one way or another with the lives of its inhabitants’ (1990: 188). Its ‘surprising ubiquitousness’ knits together a city of contrasts, from the exclusive waterside mansions of Mosman and Cremorne on the lower North Shore, to the embryonic suburbs of Middle Head, the ‘dingy’ docklands of Woolloomooloo, the new apartments that replaced the slums of Darlinghurst, and finally to what was then the outer suburb of Drummoyne. In each of the novels, the waterway is ‘vitally entangled’ with human society and the built environment in both banal and sublime ways. The writers’ literary maps of the city favour watery and littoral places, locations that afford engagement with various forces shaping modern Sydney: international capitalism, global interchange of goods and ideas, the competing demands of nature and culture in urban development and the complex debts of colonialism. South Head, where the landmass meets the ocean and Phillip first landed, is in the fiction a site of spatial transition and temporal rupture, a place where city and world, past and future intersect. Circular Quay and the docks of Woolloomooloo show a busy working port structured by commercial capitalism and ocean trade, but closer to the shore these systems beget pollution and poverty. Dark describes ‘the ships spewing out their dirty water into [the harbour], stewards emptying their buckets of garbage, tourists throwing the bottles of their last carousal out of the portholes’ (1990: 144). Stead writes of ‘poor children … and their mothers’ raking through shoreline debris left by the high tide, ‘gathering coke, chips, even vegetables thrown overboard in port from the vessels’ (2015: 71–72). Tennant’s Foveaux follows ‘invisible’ water flowing through drains and pipes in the city’s slums, tracing the connections between water infrastructure, civic politics and geometries of urban power. In Sydney, explain geographers Davies and Wright, this is a history of ‘tragedy, foresight, protectionism and social upheaval’ (Gandy 2014: 3; Davies and Wright 2014: 450). What about below the surface, the watery depths themselves? Paradoxically, in the novels this is the space most burdened by signification and seemingly also the most resistant to it. This waterway is a ‘lovely estuary’ or a ‘waste of water’; it is ‘dull silver like a misted blade’ or a ‘long and shining finger of the sea’ (Stead 2015: 74, 256; Dark 1990:

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36). It is pure and polluted, a primal force and an unsettled historical archive, a space of spiritual ‘security and anchorage’ or a baroque tyrant meting out death and suffering (Dark 1990: 188). Ultimately, the waterway’s meaning is unfixed, dynamically changeable. Hydrology also affords dynamic aesthetic and narrative opportunities. The estuary is tidal, its mix of fresh and saltwater is constantly renewed. It is both open and closed to the wider world via the Pacific Ocean and holds its past in silt and suspended sediment (Mayer-Pinto et al. 2015: 1093). In the novels, these hydrologic features manifest as centrifugal narrative structures, city space traversed by rhythms of vernacular speech and restless feet, multiperspectival narration, and braided or layered temporalities. The estuary’s hydrology also accords with the novels’ mix of aesthetic, discursive and ideological allegiances and influences. This produces representations of the city energised by lively interaction between sometimes combative forces and forms. For instance, read Christina Stead’s description of a bright morning in Circular Quay: Coloured spokes and plates whirling past on cars in the street were confounded with the wake of the morning ferry, boiling silver, and the oily eddies at the side, with flakes of blinding light, like a dragon in plate-mail. (86)

Stead’s ebullient linguistic flourishes reflect her delight in the dynamic scenery, but verb-noun combinations such as ‘boiling silver’, ‘oily eddies’ and ‘blinding light’ subtly suggest arrested movement and potentially dangerous excess. A generous reading of the ‘dragon in plate-mail’ simile attributes it to the mythical air with which Stead imbues elements of her hometown; otherwise, it is forced, awkward artifice, evidence that something about the young city remains impervious to narration. This is writing with the waterway through language choice, layering joy and despair, excess and ruination in swirling eddies of description. In 1947 Marjorie Barnard was commissioned to write the text for The Sydney Book, a small volume of etchings of the city by arts publisher Sydney Ure Smith. Barnard’s brief impressions of Sydney and urban life more broadly are illuminative, often evocative and sometimes remarkably prescient; thus, I refer often to them throughout this book. In the volume’s concluding pages, Barnard writes:

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It is not easy to see a great city as a whole, in one coup d’oeil. There are maps and plans, but they only tell a part of the story. It is not in the form of a blueprint that a city makes its impact on the imagination. A plan is static, immobile, but the city itself is always in flux, changeable, full of moods and whims. (1947: 26)

If a map or blueprint only tells ‘part of the story’, then what form best reflects the city in all its ‘flux’? For writers of the interwar generation, only the novel could ‘synthesise the disparate ethical, historical and political knowledges of the present’ (Carter 2013: 180). As Barnard Eldershaw write in Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow, the novel is an ‘elastic, free, inclusive form’, capable of engaging with ‘large, rich, confused, intricate’ phenomena (1983: 73). One such phenomenon was the modern city, figured in the novels as a space in which nation, world, race, gender, class and capitalism coalesce and collide. In Forms: Whole, Rhythm, Hierarchy, Network (2015), Caroline Levine positions narratives as ‘valuable heuristic forms’, because they ‘can set in motion multiple social forms and track them as they co-operate, come into conflict, and overlap, without positing an ultimate cause’ (19). For Levine, the world is ‘jam-packed’ with forms—social, political, aesthetic, material—that regularly come into contact and enable, disrupt or neutralise each other. In this context, literary form lays claim to its own ‘organizing power’, for it can stage encounters between forms that limit the authority of some and activate the latent affordances of others (7). Levine’s framework is useful for thinking through the relation between the city, the waterway and the novel upon which this book relies. Harnessing the novel’s capacity to track forms as they ‘cross and collide’ (Levine 2015: 122), and tapping into the aesthetic possibilities of the city built on water, the writers considered by this study present an Australian urban modernity of material emplacement in an unpredictably watery sphere, where history settles and sediments, multiple ideological schemas flow into one another, and relations between bodies, space and power generation constant contestation. In doing so, they pioneer a mode of writing geographically, temporally and aesthetically specific to the provincial modernity of Sydney.

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Modernism in the Estuary Sydney, its Waterway and Australian Literary Modernism aims to engage with the myth and the reality of Sydney Harbour, with water as both metaphor and matter. Accordingly, I draw on work from what is variously known as the ‘new thalassology’, ‘blue cultural studies’, or ‘hydrocriticism’ (Mentz 2009a: xi; 96; Winkiel 2019: 1).2 In literary studies, this turn towards the aqueous and oceanic reads bodies of texts via bodies of water, with the latter understood as both material, historicised entities and long-standing opportunities for poetic and narrative engagement with a changing world. In The Novel and the Sea (2010), Margaret Cohen argues that the practice of maritime ‘craft’ informed the ‘plain style’ of written accounts like Cook’s of his wreck on the Great Barrier Reef, which in turn inspired the narrative form and poetics of the modern novel. As Cohen explains, ‘craft’ is the skillset that allows the ‘compleat mariner’ to undertake ‘path-breaking explorations’ and navigate safely through marine elements of ‘flux, danger, and destruction’ (4). Novelists beginning with Defoe adapted the strategies of craft to develop new modes of narrative fiction, allowing readers to also exercise their ‘craft’ via a ‘well-oiled narrative chain of problem-solving’ (8). Cohen argues that the influence of ‘craft’ extends to works outside of the adventure genre. In domestic fiction like Samuel Richardson’s Pamela (1740), protagonists at ‘edge zones’ and readers alike must employ ‘craft’ as they navigate uncharted social and narrative territories (13). In delivering this alternate history of the modern novel, Cohen’s aim is to encourage revision of the ‘long-standing prejudices that those processes and events defining the modern novel occur on land’ (13). Steve Mentz’s study of Shakespeare’s theatrical engagements with the ocean attends not only to the maritime sphere but to water as material element. At the Bottom of Shakespeare’s Ocean (2009a) argues convincingly that for Shakespeare, the ocean is both ‘a nearly inconceivable physical reality and a mind-twisting force for change and instability’ (x). In the plays, the sea is both an impetus for and a challenge to poetic form (11). The oceanic turn in conjunction with transnational and regional paradigms of the new modernist studies has produced a ‘modernism at sea’, with critics exploring how oceans and oceanic traffic inflect work produced in the context of crumbling empires and rapidly 2 See also Mentz, ‘Towards a Blue Cultural Studies’ (2009b).

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changing configurations of time and space (Winkiel 2019: 7). John Brannigan develops an ‘archipelagic modernism’, rereading canonical urban modernists James Joyce and Virginia Woolf outside of the metropolis and in the context of the archipelago, the coastline and the sea. This non-urban approach, Brannigan argues, yields a ‘cosmopolitan geography of uncertain boundaries’ (2015: 72). In a recent piece for the ‘hydrocriticism’ special issue of English Language Notes (2019), Harris Feinsod offers a model of comparative modernism structured by the Panama Canal. At the height of twentieth-century modernism, the narrow, artificial shipping route that connects the Pacific and Atlantic oceans via the Isthmus of Panama was deeply striated by class, capitalism and colonial violence. Feinsod traces modernist engagements with the Canal that portray it variously as a place of trade and tourism, injury and death. Thus, for Feinsod the Canal exemplifies a model of transnational modernism ‘at once connected by intensifying flows and fortified by proliferating blockages’ (2019: 117). ‘In all the coastal nations of the modernizing world’, Feinsod argues, ‘often-discarded works of literature and art … attest to this push and pull of connection and blockage and string its tension along several axes of identity and difference’ (117). Feinsod’s assertion of a modernism characterised by both connection and blockage accords with the critical history and model of Australian modernism I invoke in the title of this book. Consider an early passage from Stead’s Seven Poor Men of Sydney that epitomises a modernism of simultaneous flow and obstruction: Early in the morning, through the open window, the people hear the clatter of anchors falling into the bay, and the little boys run out to name the liners waiting there for the port doctor, liners from Singapore, Shanghai, Nagasaki, Wellington, Hawaii, San Francisco, Naples, Brindisi, Dunkirk and London, in the face of all these old stone houses, decayed weatherboard cottages, ruinous fences, boathouses and fishermen’s shanties. Presently a toot, the port doctor puts out in the Hygeia; a whistle, the Customs launch goes alongside; a hoot from the Point, and that is the pilot-ship returning to its anchorage. A bell jangles on the wharf where the relief pilot waits for his dinghy, and the ferry whistles to clear the dinghies, rowing-boats and children’s canoes from its path. The fishermen murmur round the beach-path, fishing-nets dry in the sun, a bugle blows in the camp, the inspected ships draw up their anchors and go off up the harbour, superb with sloping masts, or else, in disgrace, flying the yellow

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flag, to the rightabout, with nose in air, to Quarantine, under North Head and its bleak graveyard. (2015: 1–2)

In Virginia Woolf’s ‘Docks of London’ (1931), ships from Australia arrive on the Thames at the behest of the English consumer, who demands products—like ‘woollen overcoats’—produced by invisible colonial labour (2009: 198). ‘It is we’, Woolf writes, ‘—our tastes, our fashions, our needs—that make the cranes dip and swing, that call the ships from the sea’ (2009: 198). Writing from the ‘other direction’, Stead’s configuration flips the trajectory Woolf observes: London is last stop in a vast network of trading ports (Morrison 2013: 1). For Fiona Morrison, Stead offers ‘an antipodean decentring of imperial hierarchies’, challenging ‘the familiar national canons and canonical temporalities of modernism’ (2013: 2). Accordingly, in Stead’s description the waterway is jostled by ocean liners, pilot-ships, dinghies and children’s canoes, vessels whose differing speeds and capacities reflect an asynchronous modernism of different temporalities and priorities. At the end of the passage, the international liners are either accepted into the harbour, ‘superb with sloping masts’, or rejected and sent to Quarantine ‘under North Head and its bleak graveyard’. This is an image of both exchange and obstacle; Stead’s is a ‘critical cosmopolitanism’ (Walkowitz 2006). Thus, the passage models modernism understood as a ‘capacious and self-reflexive problem space’ (Saint-Amour 2018: 441). A traditional reading of Australian modernism stresses, as a critic wrote as recently as 2016, its ‘eccentricity and its improbability, its untimeliness and its abortiveness—even, and perhaps especially, that lingering question about whether it ever existed at all’ (Moody 2016). It is true that high modernism was viewed with suspicion by some scions of Australian literature and art. In the 1920s, Jack Lindsay denounced European modernism in art as a ‘retreat to decadence, to the uncivilised, a celebration of the primitive and the childish and a direct assault by charlatans and Jews on the finest traditions of Western art’ (Croft 1988: 410). Tanya Dalziell notes that Nettie Palmer’s Modern Australian Literature 1900–1923, published in 1924, actually produced a ‘nationalist idea of the modern’ that was ‘increasingly seen from the 1920s onwards … as hostile to modernism’ (2007: 771). More directly, in their Essays on Australian Literature (1938) Barnard Eldershaw blasted the ‘naturalistic ramblings’ of Joyce and Gertrude Stein as ‘exasperating and antipathetic to the average intelligence’ (113).

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More recently, however, critics have shown that the simple binary of nationalist and traditionalist versus modernist and avant-garde is insufficient when applied to the multiform nature of literary and cultural discourse during this period in Sydney. In this discourse, David Carter identifies a complex interrelation of ‘traditional, vitalist, bohemian and communist’ tendencies, plus ‘a distinctly modern sense of social and cultural crisis’ (Carter 2013: 24). Critics including Sue Carson (2004, 2009), Nicole Moore (2001), Fiona Morrison (2009, 2013), Brigid Rooney (2013), and Melinda Cooper (2018, 2020) have argued for recognition of ‘latent modernisms and modernities’ in interwar fiction by women writers, tracking their use and transformation of modernist aesthetics, their troubling of the relationship between imperial centre and periphery and their codifying of ‘newness and gendered modernity in a “late-colonial” metropolis’ (Cooper 2020: 319; Moore 2001: 61). Reading Rex Ingamells’s 1938 manifesto of the nationalist poetry movement the Jindyworobaks, Ellen Smith flips centre and periphery by arguing that Ingamells’s call for local authenticity evokes its own kind of avant-garde aesthetics. In this ‘provincial modernism’, regional attachment structures the encounter with international culture (2012: 4). While I do not entirely accept Smith’s reading of Ingamells’s manifesto as avantgarde, I do agree that ‘rather than trying to deny the provincialism of Australian modernism’, we should ‘take that provincialism seriously’ (15). While the transnational or ‘world’ turn in modernist studies has offered new avenues for engaging with Australian work, there is still some emphasis on selecting or positioning texts according to their ability to transcend the local context and exhibit a suitably cosmopolitan, ‘multiscalar’ or ‘planetary’ technique or outlook.3 However, systems of colonial power play out on both national and regional scales, and a purely transnational or ‘world’ approach risks minimising the impact of these

3 In Backgazing: Reverse Time in Modernist Culture (2019), Paul Giles investigates Eleanor Dark’s interest in nested and tensile timescales with reference to her wide reading of modernists including Aldous Huxley, Virginia Woolf and James Joyce (2019: 200– 201). Giles argues that Waterway ‘consciously imitates’ a Joycean model of ‘heterodox … chronometry’, claiming that the novel takes its title from the ‘Hades’ section of Ulysses; specifically, the line ‘“On the slow weedy waterway he had floated on his raft coastward over Ireland”’ (201; qtd. 208). Giles argues that Waterway is ‘fundamentally’ a novel of ‘planetary space’ and ‘planetary time’ (209). However, without tracing the intervening fractures of region, nation and empire, this seems an exclusively Anglophone planet of unidirectional movement from the canonical centre to the imitative periphery.

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systems on settler texts, which are often imbricated with racalised logics in complex ways. Furthermore, anthropogenic climate change, as a condition of Western modernity and symptom of settler culture, requires more, rather than less understanding of the physical environments in which we dwell. This is particularly true in Sydney, which has the unfortunate distinction of being a ‘hotspot’ for global climate change (Hannam 2020). By reading literary experimentation through the simultaneously bounded and elastic spatio-temporal framework of the Sydney estuary in the interwar period, this book offers a model of ‘regional’ or localised modernism that affords opportunities to engage with aesthetic, thematic and formal responses to modernity understood as a phenomenon that is both situated and transcalar, conceptual and embodied. As Neal Alexander and James Moran argue, recognition of ‘local eccentricities and alternative cultural priorities’ can yield insights about modernist practices not available to models that stress a synthetic cosmopolitanism (2013: 15).

Making Sydney Modern After recovery from the economic downturn of the 1890s and Federation in 1901, efforts began to modernise and formalise Sydney, an inchoate city that still had the look and feel of an antiquated colonial outpost. In 1907, J. D. ‘Jack’ Fitzgerald, Sydney alderman and later NSW parliamentarian, published a long article decrying Sydney as the ‘Cinderella of cities’: a pretty face, but covered in dirt. Despite having been afforded the ‘finest natural position on earth’, Sydney was ‘the ugliest, the most backward … the most disease-stricken’ city imaginable (56). The harbour had given ‘its perfect scenery, its protected berthage, its depth of water, its salubrity of climate, its commercial position, its hygienic advantages’, but these gifts had been squandered (58). Fitzgerald writes: Through the central gateway of the Pacific—through the massive portals of the North and South Head—the ships of the world are proclaiming, with their hundred flags; the commercial greatness of the present, and heralding the greater future of this city—but what they greet is a city flung down in a crazy mass, formless, inorganic, a maze of slums, of ruelles, defiles, cul-de-sacs; a tangle of competing and incompetent civic, governmental, and private authorities. (58)

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Sydney, Fitzgerald concluded, should look to Haussmann’s Paris, ‘torn to pieces and beautified’, as a ‘model city’ (58). Surely it was possible ‘to carve out’ the embarrassing disorder and re-build a metropolis worthy of its waterway (59). Over the next two decades, governing bodies and other interested parties ‘sought new ways to change the story of their city from the old one of chaotic growth to a new one of it as a place of order and modern rationality’ (Matthews 2005: 35). In material terms, this took the form of demolition and rebuilding. From 1900, hundreds of acres of land were resumed in order to reorient the city centre towards commerce and transport. The large-scale razing of what were primarily working-class neighbourhoods represented, as Sue Doyle explains, ‘the working out of an ideology’, namely, the ‘ideology of progress’ in line with ‘the ethos of modernity’ (2005). The working-class (45% of the population in 1933) were pushed out to the city’s fringes and away from their work (Matthews 2005: 46, 35). After the demolition of the slums, rehousing the city’s most vulnerable residents was never seriously attempted (Keating 1991: 10). By the end of the 1930s, much of the colonial and Victorian city had been demolished and replaced by office buildings and blocks of flats in the modern style. At the peak of the reconstruction in the midtwenties, almost five hundred new buildings were erected in the city centre (Matthews 2005: 46). The symbol of the city’s progress and emergent industrial future was the Sydney Harbour Bridge, opened with enormous fanfare in 1932. As the largest single-span bridge in the world at the time, it was proclaimed ‘an arch of triumph of British engineering and of Australian enterprise and industry’ (qtd. Smyth 1998: 243). One of the Bridge’s most effusive fans, the Reverend Frank Cash, wrote in the introduction to his bizarre, self-published account of the Bridge’s development, Parables of the Sydney Harbour Bridge (1930), that the structure was ‘a visible sign, of the invisible and originative [sic] power of man, to develop and carry designs through’, and thus, ‘displays outwardly … the image of God’ (ix, emphasis in original). With the opening of the Bridge, the young country had seemingly fulfilled the technological domination of nature that real modernity required. Commentators at the time remarked that with the coming of this ‘steel colossus of a new age’, time itself seemed to flow differently (qtd. Smyth 1998: 243). ‘The old leisurely processions of ferry-steamers up and down and across the harbour have sadly shrunk’, wrote Paul McGuire,

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now that it is possible to rush to and fro, people rush. The great charm of an older Sydney was that one took so long from place to place, and that one’s journeys often required a pleasant water-passage. But now one rips about by electric train and bus and, and one loses one’s temper in the traffic queues … Sydney has lost its fine flavour of leisure. (qtd. Barnard 1956: 72)

Coinciding with the expansion of the rail network and an uptick in motor vehicle usage, the Harbour Bridge brought modern speed to Sydney. In the 1920s, Sydney hosted a fashionable, commercial modernism aimed at the new middle-class female consumer (Jordan 1993: 202). This was typified by the upscale magazine The Home, produced quarterly between 1920 and 1942. Sydney was regularly featured in the magazine, in spreads of new ‘Paris-inspired fashion’ from the city’s major department stores David Jones and Myer’s, advertisements for fine dining at the best hotels, descriptions of the latest art exhibitions and pictures from high society parties.4 The magazine often showcased art, design and photographs by modernist pioneers including Thea Proctor, Hera Roberts, Margaret Preston and Max Dupain. Through the late twenties and early thirties, readers were kept up to date on the progress of the Bridge, with pictures of steel girders next to the magazine’s regular fare of evening gowns and interior furnishings. Tanya Dalziell explains that The Home made modernism ‘both the desired, immanent object of Australia’, and a sign that the nation was ‘not quite contemporary’ (2007: 773). Consumers were encouraged to buy the products that would bring them up to speed with the modern world—a goal that could only ever be endlessly deferred. This tension fulfilled a capitalist project: at a time of splintering empire, The Home sought to continue colonial logics by arranging the world ‘spatially, ideologically and economically’ by way of commercial capitalism. In this regard, Dalziell argues, ‘modernism was not so much an aesthetic imposition as an economic relation that rehearsed colonial structures of power’ (2007: 773). In 1938, the Sesquicentenary celebrations in Sydney crafted a narrative of advancement from colony to modernity ‘within a theme of natural abundance and social progress’ (MacDonald 2013: 101). Humphrey MacQueen argues that the event was designed to fulfil three aims: ‘restore 4 The complete archive of The Home has been digitised by the National Library of Australia and is free to view via Trove at http://nla.gov.au/nla.obj-362409353.

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the bonds of Empire; bind up the wounds of class conflict; and show a united, active people to possible invaders’ (2004: 162). Accordingly, the celebrations downplayed the country’s convict origins, consigned to the past the dispossession and murder of its Aboriginal owners, ignored the class struggles still occurring at the tail end of the Great Depression, and paid no heed to the storm brewing in Europe. This was a racialised and gendered settler modernity. ‘From so small a beginning has sprung the virile Australian nation’, announces the narrator of Frank Hurley’s commemorative film A Nation is Built (1937), ‘on Port Jackson is now the Empire’s second greatest white city’ (qtd. in Smyth 1998: 245). In their special Sesquicentenary edition, The Home offered readers a ‘decorative map of Sydney in colour for framing’ (March 1938). The map is less an accurate topography than an idealised image of civic maturity. In this ‘decorative’, commodified city, important architectural features and civic buildings are labelled and arranged in an orderly, grid-like formation that is complemented by the smooth convolutions of the flat blue harbour that surrounds, but does not intrude upon it. The Sesquicentenary, The Home, the Bridge and the demolitions all relied on the unquestioned association of modernity with progress. In the interwar period, Aboriginal people countered this association by drawing attention to the continued barbarism of the colonial state. ‘White Australia’, wrote William Ferguson and Jack Patten of the Aborigines’ Progressive Association, could not claim to be ‘a civilised, progressive, kindly and human nation. By your cruelty and callousness towards the Aborigines you stand condemned in the eyes of the civilised world’ (1938: 3). Making use of modern forms of communication and dissent including the manifesto and public protest, Aboriginal political groups designated Australia Day 1938 as a Day of Mourning, countering the Sesquicentenary’s consignment of Aboriginal people to the past. ‘This festival of so-called “progress” in Australia’, wrote Ferguson and Patten, ‘commemorates also 150 years of misery and degradation imposed upon the original native inhabitants by the white invaders of this country’ (3). The pamphlet concludes by rerouting the language of contemporary progressive politics, calling for a ‘Modern Age’ founded on a ‘New Deal’ for Aboriginal people as equal citizens (11). As I discuss later in this introduction and throughout the book, this was an idea of modernity that even settlers who acknowledged the sins of colonialism struggled to assimilate into their understanding of the present and visions for the future.

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Tides of Progress, Tides of History In his unfinished study of urban modernity, the Arcades Project, Walter Benjamin includes notes on perhaps the most famous city renewal project in modern history, Baron Haussmann’s transformation of Paris in the mid-nineteenth century. Apparently quoting the man himself, Benjamin refers to Haussmann as an ‘artist-demolitionist’ (1999: 128). Another recorded quotation from Lucien Dubech and Pierre d’Espezel explains that Haussmann created ‘an artificial city, in which the Parisian … no longer feels at home’ (1999: 129). For Benjamin, Haussmann’s Paris ‘figured heavily in the mythic imagery of historical progress’ and functioned as ‘a monument to the state’s role in achieving it’ (Buck-Morss 1991: 89). Like Haussmann’s levelling of the old city in the name of its imagined ascendent future, historical progress obscures and flattens the past, reflecting ‘an uncritical hypostatisation rather than a critical interrogation’ (Benjamin 1999: 478). This is what Benjamin called historicism: history as a ‘phantasmagoria’ (1999: 25). Historicism unambiguously links past to present in an image of the ‘infinite perfectibility of mankind’ (2007: 260). It renders history a ‘triumphal procession’ that marches over the forgotten victims of the violent regression it has confused for progress (2007: 256). ‘With the Haussmannization of Paris’, Benjamin writes, the ‘phantasmagoria’ of history was ‘rendered in stone’ (1999: 24). Benjamin’s aim is to expose and deconstruct historicism through a critical methodology based on collection of the ‘refuse of history’, salvaged from the ruins of modernity (1999: 461). For Benjamin, the excavation site par excellence is the Parisian arcade. Once the height of fashion, many of the iron and glass-covered shopping arcades were destroyed in Haussmann’s renovation of the city. Those that remained in the twentieth century were shabby, their shop windows full of antiquated fashions and broken-down commodities (1999: 872). These outdated remnants reflect both the regressive logic of capitalism, ‘an energy by which this epoch immediately transforms and appropriates antiquity’, and the latent desires they once inspired (1999: 236; Leslie 2006: 96). By bringing these objects into constellation with the present, one can expose the phantasmagoria of historicism. Benjamin explains this methodology in Convolute N of the Arcades Project: In the fields with which we are concerned, knowledge comes only in lightning flashes. The text is the long roll of thunder that follows. …

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Comparison of other people’s attempts to the undertaking of a sea voyage in which the ships are drawn off course by the magnetic North Pole. Discover this North Pole. What for others are deviations are, for me, the data which determine my course.—On the differentials of time (which, for others, disturb the main lines of the inquiry), I base my reckoning. (1999: 456)

If one aims to problematise historicism, then one’s approach cannot be systematic and linear. Instead, one must look for moments, spaces and images in which the past and the present come together suddenly, arbitrarily. Benjamin characterises this coming together as a flash, a brief ‘awakening’, a denkbild or thought-image in which ‘thinking stops in a configuration pregnant with tensions’ (1999: 462; 2007: 262). These tensions produce knowledge that is true not because it is unproblematic, but rather, because it recognises that such a condition is impossible. Hence the text is a ‘long roll of thunder’, echoing but not extending beyond the initial lightning flash. Critical enquiry is not a journey to true North, but the ability to allow oneself to be pulled by the currents and recognise the significance of these unexpected detours and disturbances. I recognise that a connection between the mystic, Marxist urban philosophy of a displaced German Jewish intellectual and the fiction of Australian middle-class women may seem somewhat incongruent. Yet, Benjamin was working and producing his most notable city writings at roughly the same time as the writers featured in this book. Benjamin’s theories and the writers’ Sydney novels both have their genesis in cities experiencing social, cultural or political flux, albeit of different kinds and to differing degrees. This context generated similar concerns about the oppositional forces governing modernity, and the development of a new mode for critically engaging with the city as both physical space and ideological construct. Benjamin’s method was to write the city through its hidden places, its marginal figures and its detritus. For the writers in this book, it is to write the city through the waterway, a site of global capital that is simultaneously ladened with complex histories, enormous symbolic capital and contradictory affects. Reading across the novels, a dialectical tension recurs that we might extrapolate from the novels themselves as the ‘tides’ of progress and history. ‘The high tide of progress surges in upon us’, Mayor ‘Honest’ John Hutchinson tells his citizens in Kylie Tennant’s Foveaux. ‘The waves of progress … will sweep away the wreckage which for years has cumbered

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Foveaux’ (81). Ironically, ‘Honest’ John is not to be trusted, and while the ‘high tide of progress’ demolishes the slums and builds motor-garages along the suburb’s main artery, it leaves the working-class poor with less than they had before. For them, progress is a ‘juggernaut’ that ‘would roll on grinding any human plans to powder’ (2014: 25, 420). The tide of history is the inverse of the tide of progress: it flows backwards, circulates and repeats, carrying with it the ‘dust in history’ left in progress’s wake (Barnard Eldershaw 1983: 386). Writers invite the tide of history into their novels by silting urban modernity with the forgotten, the discarded, the maimed and the silenced. As ‘sites … where multiple forms cross and collide’, the Sydney novels disorder modernity’s neat arrangements (Levine 2015: 122). Past and future are not reconciled, social experience is murky with poverty & inequity, and class conflict remains a stain on the fabric of urban society. In the novels, the gendered modernity of the ‘virile Australian nation’ is challenged by attention to intersections of gender, class, urban space and social mobility. Key characters in Stead, Dark and Barnard Eldershaw’s work are men that are sick, injured or otherwise weakened by poverty. Their struggles to eke out a living and existential meaning in urban modernity usually result in despair, disfigurement or death. With the exception of the deliberately male-focused Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow, the novels feature middle-class women as intellectual observers and sometimes urban writers. Dynamic yet limited Catherine Baguenault in Seven Poor Men of Sydney, Jungfrau’s cast of independent professional women, Waterway’s young writer Lesley Channon and Foveaux’s rational jack-of-all-trades Linnie Montague model selfreflexively the systems of inclusion and exclusion that structure the women writers’ own positions in the city and literary discourse. In the context of growing Aboriginal political activism, white leftleaning intellectuals in the interwar period began attempting to confront the nation’s shameful origins. The writers discussed in this book accepted the illegitimacy of empire and terra nullius and recognised the early colony’s record of abuse and murder; however, there is less evidence of willingness to extend that critique to contemporary Aboriginal relations. Eleanor Dark was one of the first white public figures to name the events of 1788 an invasion and an act of ‘contamination’, two words she uses in this context multiple times in Waterway and throughout her

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body of work.5 In the opening pages of the novel, Dark attempts a moment of ‘empathetic re-imagining’ (Rooney 2013: 108), momentarily restoring Aboriginal signification to the waterway. With South Head at dawn serving as a portal into the past, Dark remaps Port Jackson with Aboriginal names: It was this same place that you saw, this pale, flat water between dark headlands; but the headlands were not Blue’s Point and Potts Point, Longnose Point and Slaughter-house Point. They were Warringarea and Yarranabbe, Yeroulbine and Tarrah. Far along that slowly brightening waterway you could see a little island, dark in the middle of its silver path—not Pinchgut, where miserable convicts suffered or hung in chains, not a foolish little fortress, staidly renamed Fort Denison, but a lovely soaring column of weather-worn rock, holy place of your people—Mattewaya… (1990: 12–13)

In Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow, contemporary Australian society is a ‘sluggish tide’, ‘turbid and without rhythm’ (1983: 45, 12). Economic privation sends people ‘circulating rootless through the country or gravitating towards the cities’ in a ‘multiplicity of hybrid, uncoordinated patterns’ (12). In comparison, Barnard Eldershaw writes, the First People … lived [on the land] according to its terms without changing or penetrating it. The pattern of their lives wound, like a kabbalistic sign traced in water, through the bush. Their apparently free roaming had followed a set tide. (4)

This conflation of Aboriginal and mystic Jewish belief systems is symptomatic of a modernist primitivism that figures the Other as keeper of a desired, pre-modern mythology. ‘We might have learned much from [Aboriginal Australians]’, Barnard Eldershaw write in their history of the continent My Australia (1983), ‘but we were too concerned with taking and the chance has almost gone. … We have had to make our own separate peace with the earth’ (1951: 287). In the novels, if Aboriginal people are referenced at all, they are a sign of settler modernity’s failures and a possible source of philosophic

5 In Waterway, see, for example, 12, 186, 383, 238. See also ‘Caroline Chisholm’ (1988).

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wisdom to inspire a better future, but never a participant in it. Accordingly, in Waterway, the moment of ‘wilful mysticism’ that allowed Fort Denison to become Mattewaya is brief. When Oliver Denning returns to South Head at the novel’s conclusion, what he sees is not the past but the future, the waterway is spanned by the Harbour Bridge, ‘like a rainbow’ (384). This is a sign not of settler modernity’s failings but its ultimate success. To quote Jed Esty, the novels in this study work ‘neither as a direct counterdiscourse to the imperial metanarratives of modernity … nor as their docile, apologetic partner’ (2012: 36). Rather, their place-based imaginaries are structured by forms and forces—leftist politics, liberal humanism, modernist primitivism, racist colonial logics, settler futurity and the historical record—that collide but can never be fully be reconciled. In Australia as in Europe and the UK, after the hopeful twenties the stock market crash in 1929 gave rise to a sense of crisis that grew exponentially throughout the thirties as the world moved closer to another global war. Stead began writing Seven Poor Men of Sydney in 1928, finishing it overseas in the early thirties. The book is set during the 1925 seamen’s strike, and visions of a modern, socialist utopia battle with suspicion that ‘history is at a standstill’ (2015: 330). By 1938, another war seemed all but certain, and the later novels in this study are marked by increasing anxiety. Kylie Tennant’s Foveaux is perhaps the most ‘parochial’ of the five novels, being principally concerned with one small suburb and its petty intrigues—a barmaid threatening her husband with a bread knife, a bully called Mrs Metting accusing her neighbours of being ‘police pimps’ and ‘dirty spies’—but even Tennant looks with some concern towards international happenings outside of Foveaux (2014: 379, 380). At the end of the novel, ocean bathers look out to the sea and the world beyond, reading in the newspapers of the ‘War in Spain’ and an ‘Air Raid on Madrid’ (420). Early in Dark’s Waterway, a familiar morning walk along the beach at South Head is interrupted by a startling premonition: Afterwards Ian was to remember that in this pale November dawn the walk which he had taken so many times had seemed strange. He had noticed the sound of his own footsteps on the asphalt path which led him down to the beach, and he had found himself looking upward several times into the empty silver sky, as if some part of him were expecting an event, a happening so monstrous and cataclysmic and yet so utterly formless that there seemed no other place from which it might appear but the illimitable

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heavens. Only the salt-water smell of the harbour, that smell which had been in nearly every breath of his nostrils since boyhood, formed a link between reality and the dreamlike quality of this summer morning fugue. (1990: 33)

Looking up into the sky, Ian imagines a catastrophe so ‘monstrous and cataclysmic’ that it seems ‘formless’, as if beyond narration. Reflecting an anxious futurity, the opening adverb ‘afterwards’ frames the passage as a recollection from an unspecified future moment, perhaps after the disaster has come to pass. The image conveys growing concern, after the aerial bombardments of Abyssinia, Spain and China, that a global air war coming (Ellis 2015: 1). Writers and commentators at the time experimented with ways to represent the world-ending destruction of the city via the bomber plane, evoking the familiar correlation of the metropolis with civilisation (Mellor 2011; 11; Saint-Amour 2015: 4–7). This sense of crisis reaches its apotheosis in Barnard Eldershaw’s Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow, written between 1940 and 1944. In what is perhaps the only Australian example of the interwar (or early war) ‘world’s end novel’ (Saint-Amour 2015: 137), Barnard Eldershaw imagine the bombing of Sydney by the Japanese, plague brought by the Americans, and subsequent social fragmentation and civic unrest that triggers the city’s total collapse. Lashing out at the city as a ‘symbol of greed and profit’ (1983: 384), citizens reduce Sydney to rubble, and twentieth-century civilisation collapses completely soon after. Making use of a future-history model employed often by H. G. Wells and George Bernard Shaw in their post-World War I utopian fictions,6 Barnard Eldershaw use a frame narrative to tell the story of the city’s death from the perspective of twenty-fourth century. From the ‘watchtower of time’ (12), their intellectual-writer character explains the origins of the apocalypse: The Australians had brought a new sort of death to the continent— not overt violence but the unregarded, unrecorded death of dumb men and beasts, bound luckless upon the machine. Death as the unplanned by-product, the leakage of the system—animals caught by drought on overstocked pastures, men caught by depression in overproduced cities,

6 See Innes (2003) for discussion of the future-history utopia as employed by Shaw and Wells.

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a needless repeating pattern—the softfooted death with the look of accident was not accident, but a part of the relentless logic of a way of life: the loneliness of condoned death. (12)

As this passage indicates, the novel’s sense of crisis and catastrophe has its source not only in global warfare but in the threat of ecological collapse. Despite the enormous symbolic capital water holds for Sydney, Barnard Eldershaw reminds readers that it is the largest city on the driest inhabited continent on earth. The novel was written during the devastating World War II drought, which killed millions of livestock, nearly crippled wheat production and left Sydney’s Nepean Dam—a main water source— almost completely dry (Gergis 2018). In Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow, Sydney is largely without water; instead it swelters, surrounded by fires and covered in dust blown in from dried out farms. Mercury edging up in the thermometer carries an existential threat almost as great as wartime bombs. In all the novels examined in this book, issues of land misuse, environmental harm and the need for a new contract between settlers and the nonhuman world are either imminent or overt. Reading across the set, an allegory of waste and ruin emerges as the ‘water in barren hills’ in Seven Poor Men of Sydney become the dust and rubble of Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow (2015: 3). At the end of Barnard Eldershaw’s novel, one of the few survivors of the city’s destruction muses about the future. ‘Unless Australians were going to live amongst the ruins for ever’, he thinks, ‘A new pattern of life would have to be born’ (1983: 415). In different ways, each of the writers in this study invests in the idea of this ‘new pattern for life’. In their search for it, they sift through various ideologies and political positions, religious doctrine, and the new principles of life generated by modern philosophy and science. They rarely settle on any particular schema; they never succeed in totally shoring up the foundations of the city built on water. Instead, they infuse modernity’s spaces and processes with productively estuarine qualities of changeability and circulation, unsettlement and opacity.

Writing with the Waterway In the next chapter, I look closely at Seven Poor Men of Sydney, using Stead’s first novel to anchor an exploration of Sydney’s self-conscious transition from nineteenth-century provincialism to urban modernity. In

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the novel, Sydney is at once a colonial outpost, a hive of Dickensian dirt and squalor, a burgeoning metropolis in the imagine of international urbanism, and a dynamic estuarine environment of deep time. For Stead, the waterway is a primal, expressive force, and it lends to her prose an almost baroque intensity. Stead’s Sydney is ‘miasmic’, ‘damp’, ‘bloody’ and ‘foetid’, but there may be ‘water in barren hills’, a ‘pure stream [that breaks] through into the light’ (3, 99). A thoroughly modernist metaphor, this stream of light accords with the novel’s almost evangelical faith in Marxist politics, new science and modern culture to transform the city into an ‘adamant island, where the erudite lived and put the world to shame’ (146). Yet the stream of light is dimmed by the novel’s frequent invocation of the Tank Stream, the ‘run of fresh water’ that supported the English upon settlement, but two decades later was so badly polluted that it had to be buried beneath the city to avoid a public health crisis (Collins qtd. in Karskens 2009: 56; Cathcart 2009: 35). In Stead’s novel, the entombed Tank Stream serves as a synecdoche for modernity’s repressed past and continued failings. Drawing on Benjamin’s work on allegory in Origin of the German Trauerspiel , I show how Stead’s celebration of emergent modern possibilities for the young city ends as a mourning story, in which allegory captures the ruin of the narrative’s hope for a revolutionary future. Unlike Stead’s Seven Poor Men of Sydney, which was composed, published and reviewed overseas, Dymphna Cusack’s Jungfrau was published locally and received by its domestic audience as a new type of Australian writing, focused on women in the city instead of men in the bush. Cusack’s novel is self-consciously cosmopolitan, leveraging the new spaces and cultures of Sydney—art galleries, bookshops, bohemian parties in beachside modernist holiday houses—to explore the social and physical realities of life for women in the modern city. The novel is also deeply interested in the philosophical and literary potential of new science, drawing upon and referring to popular guides to new discoveries in physics by Arthur Eddington (2014) and James Jeans (1934), in addition to J. W. Dunne’s peculiar An Experiment with Time (2016) and its theory of immortality and serial selves. In Jungfrau restless Thea, young and full of inchoate desire, searches for remedies to her existential angst in ‘the subtleties of philosophies’, ‘the probings of psychoanalysis’, and the ‘dogmatism of creeds’, but admits that ‘the secret [might] lie perhaps beyond all these—somewhere in realms only dimly realised, vaguely explored’ (72). For Thea, life is a series of ‘wild tides, that engulfed her, pouring

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in and around her’ (50). Accordingly, the waterway affords sensuous freedom and erotic contact, but also becomes Thea’s chosen method of self-destruction. Making use of a watery register of metaphor drawn equally from science and Sydney Harbour, Cusack’s novel attempts to find a system of thought capable of navigating the ‘wild tides’ of life and confronting ‘the appalling tangle of living’ (50, 73). In Chapter 3, I turn towards 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 Eleanor Dark identifies as the political, ethical and ecological failings of Australian urban modernity. Her response to these failings is to develop what I call an ethics of ‘vital entanglement’, a schema for radical human-to-human and human-environment contact underpinned by ideas similar to and possibly deriving from the philosophy and writings of Henri Bergson, D. H. Lawrence and Australian symbolist poet Christopher Brennan. Dark uses a modernist single-day form and multiperspectival narration, tracking 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. In Chapter 4, a close reading of Kylie Tennant’s Foveaux accompanies an examination of the hopes and failures of urban planning discourse in the interwar period. The novel tracks the transformation of the innercity slum of Foveaux, based on Surry Hills, from 1912 when slum clearances began, through the demolitions of the late 1910s and early 1920s, until the end of the Great Depression. Tennant engages with the uneven development of water infrastructure in Sydney, highlighting water’s imbrication with the city’s power dynamics. In Foveaux, water supply and drainage issues are noted as primary causes of the suburb’s blight: residents share a communal water tank, lack bathrooms of any kind, and the floorboards of their tenements are rotted through with damp, which ‘seeped down and lay under the houses … just as it had lain in the original swamp over which the houses were built’ (128). Thus, the book reveals the ‘inherently political’ nature of urban water (Swyngedouw 2015: 20). Drawing on the motif of porosity developed by Walter Benjamin and Asja L¯acis, I show how Tennant’s novel both models and

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calls for a city made by its citizens. Spectacularly underestimated by critics, Tennant’s approach to content and form shows her interest in modern urban planning discourse, including post-war socialist housing experiments in Vienna and Le Corbusier’s utopian Ville Radieuse project of 1930. The final chapter sees the figurative immolation of this book’s object of study, as Sydney is burned to the ground in Barnard Eldershaw’s sprawling, speculative final novel, Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow. Critics including Jed Esty (2012), Marina MacKay (2007), Steve Ellis (2015), and Leo Mellor (2011) have shown how AngloEuropean writing of the thirties and early forties responded to what seemed to be a series of aesthetic, ideological and socio-politic end-points: the waning of high modernism, the rise of totalitarianism, and the threat of total urban destruction via global warfare. Works produced in this ‘late modernist’ context comprise an unsteady mix of anxiety, history, irony, mortality, a self-reflexive modernist aesthetic crossed by more middlebrow influences, and a heightened sense of political purpose.7 Barnard Eldershaw’s Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow can be located within this frame. In it, they remap Sydney as ruin, retracing in flame and rubble that familiar path from the harbour, where ‘fiery particles float in the water’, into the city where the old colonial buildings burn with ‘great dignity’ (404). By doing so, they undertake a Benjaminian urban archaeological project, aiming to reclaim and restore the ‘dust in history’ as all that remains of what has been lost to the totalising forces of war, capitalism and environmental degradation (82). Barnard Eldershaw also proclaim the death of the novel, an ‘antique form’ that their future narrator resurrects in order to tell his story of the novel’s end (83). ‘There aren’t any words that haven’t be spoiled’, they write. ‘We live too late’ (428). The narrative is animated by this sentiment, by a reflexive anxiety about writers and the novel form, and by the stylistic and structural inconsistencies brought on by the book’s impossible aspirations. ∗ ∗ ∗

7 In 1999, Tyrus Miller developed the framework of ‘late modernism’, challenging 1945 as the accepted endpoint of modernism and the idea of the thirties as a literary no-man’s land.

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Today, Sydney faces problems shared by major urban centres in coastal regions throughout the world. Increasing population density and a series of housing crises demand new solutions to the city’s age-old problems of water, energy and transport management. The Western Tasman Sea into which Port Jackson flows is warming at a rate faster than the global average (Mayer-Pinto et al. 2015: 1096). In late 2019 and early 2020, bushfires of unprecedented scale and intensity decimated suburbs at the city’s outer edges and cloaked the central business district in toxic smoke for weeks. Whether it wants to or not, Sydney is having to face up to the reality of climate change and an uncertain future. In this context, a return to literary representations of interwar Sydney is timely. As SaintAmour reminds us, the ‘disquiet about the future’ that haunts interwar fiction haunts our own moment too—indeed, such disquiet is endemic to modernity itself (2015: 38). When taken together, the novels in this study insert heterogeneity and otherness into the spaces and processes of the city, offering a model of Australian urban modernity that is not settled, but slippery and silted. We can find confluence here with the Sydney work of the great modernist artists Dorrit Black and Grace Cossington Smith, both of whom lost interest in painting the Harbour Bridge as soon as it was completed. They were drawn to the space between the two spans, where sky still met sea without interruption. Artistic frisson was generated by the possibility that the engineers may have miscalculated, that the two great steel arches would not, in the end, meet in the middle. The five novels located in this same space, preoccupied by unbound urban futures and aesthetic possibility. Reading the novels chronologically, Sydney, its Waterway and Australian Modernism shows how writers’ close engagement with contemporary Sydney, the waterway and the possibilities of narrative form lead to the development of a distinctly Australian, modern urban poetics.

Works Cited Alexander, Neal, and James Moran. “Introduction: Regional Modernisms.” In Regional Modernisms, edited by Neal Alexander and James Moran, 1–21. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2013. Attenbrow, Val. Sydney’s Aboriginal Past: Investigating the Archaeological and Historical Records. Sydney: UNSW Press, 2010. Barnard, Marjorie. Sydney: The Story of a City. Melbourne: Melbourne UP, 1956.

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Barnard, Marjorie, with drawings by Sydney Ure Smith. The Sydney Book. Sydney: Sydney Ure Smith, 1947. Barnard Eldershaw, M. Essays in Australian Fiction. Melbourne: Melbourne UP, 1938. ———. My Australia. London: Jarrolds Publishers, 1951. ———. Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow. London: Virago, 1983. Barthes, Roland. “Semiology and the Urban.” In Rethinking Architecture: A Reader in Cultural Theory, edited by Neil Leach, 166–72. London: Routledge, 1997. Benjamin, Walter. Illuminations. Translated by Harry Zohn. New York: Schocken Books, 2007. ———. The Arcades Project. Translated by Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin. Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard UP, 1999. Bevan, Scott. The Harbour: A City’s Heart, a Country’s Soul. Cammeray: Simon & Schuster, 2017. Birch, Gavin. “A Short Geologic and Environmental History of the Sydney Estuary, Australia.” In Water, Wind, Art and Debate: How Environmental Concerns Impact on Disciplinary Research, edited by Gavin Birch, 214–43. Sydney: Sydney UP, 2007. Brannigan, John. Archipelagic Modernism: Literature in the Irish and British Isles 1890–1970. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2015. Buck-Morss, Susan. The Dialectics of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1991. Carson, Susan. “A Girl’s Guide to Modernism’s Grammar: Language Politics in Experimental Women’s Fiction.” Hecate 30, no. 1 (2004): 176–83. ———. “From Sydney and Shanghai: Australian and Chinese Women Writing Modernism.” In Pacific Rim Modernisms, edited by Mary Ann Gillies, Helen Sword, and Steven Yao, 173–98. Toronto: U Toronto P, 2009. Carter, David. Always Almost Modern: Australian Print Cultures and Modernity. North Melbourne: Australian Scholarly Publishing, 2013. Cash, Frank. Parables of the Harbour Bridge: Setting Forth the Preparation for, and Progressive Growth of, the Sydney Harbour Bridge, to April, 1930. Sydney: SD Townsend, 1930. Cathcart, Michael. The Water Dreamers: The Remarkable Story of Our Dry Continent. Melbourne: Text Publishing, 2009. Cohen, Margaret. The Novel and the Sea. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2010. Cooper, Melinda J. “‘Adjusted’ Vision: Interwar Settler Modernism in Eleanor Dark’s Return to Coolami.” Australian Literary Studies 33, no. 2 (2018). https://doi.org/10.20314/als.6a06a548d6. ———.“‘A Masterpiece of Camouflage’: Modernism and Interwar Australia.” Modernist Cultures 15, no. 3 (2020): 316–40. https://doi.org/10.3366/ mod.2020.0299.

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Croft, Julian. “Responses to Modernism, 1915–1965.” In The Penguin New Literary History of Australia, edited by Laurie Hergenhan, Bruce Bennett, Martin Duwell, Brian Matthews, Peter Pierce, and Elizabeth Webby, 409–29. Ringwood: Penguin, 1988. Cusack, Dymphna. Jungfrau. Crows Nest: Allen & Unwin, 2012. Dalziell, Tanya. “Belated Arrivals: Gender, Colonialism and Modernism in Australia.” In Modernism, edited by Astradur Eysteinsson and Vivian Liska, 769–80. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2007. Dark, Eleanor. ‘Caroline Chisholm and Her Times.’ In The Peaceful Army, edited by Flora Eldershaw, 55–85. Ringwood: Penguin Books, 1988. ———. Waterway. Sydney: Collins/Angus & Robertson, 1990. Davies, P.J., and I.A. Wright. “A Review of Policy, Legal, Land Use and Social Change in the Management of Urban Water Resources in Sydney, Australia: A Brief Reflection of Challenges and Lessons from the Last 200 Years.” Land Use Policy 36 (2014): 450–60. Derricourt, Robin. “The South Head Peninsula of Sydney Harbour: Boundaries in Space and Time.” JHRAS 96, no. 1 (2010): 27–49. Doyle, Sue. “Doomed Streets of Sydney 1900–1928: Images from the City Council’s Demolition Books.” Scan 2, no. 3 (2005). http://scan.net.au/ scan/journal/display.php?journal_id=64. Dunne, J. W. An Experiment with Time. Kindle Edition. Auckland: Pickle Partners Publishing, 2016. Eddington, Arthur. The Nature of the Physical World: Gifford Lectures of 1927, an Annotated Edition. Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2014. Edwards, Deborah, and Denise Mimmocchi, eds. Sydney Moderns: Art for a New World. Sydney: Art Gallery of NSW, 2013. Ellis, Steve. British Writers and the Approach of World War II. New York: Cambridge UP, 2015. Esty, Jed. Unseasonable Youth: Modernism, Colonialism, and the Fiction of Development. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2012. Feinsod, Harris. “Canal Zone Modernism: Cendrars, Walrond, and Stevens at the ‘Suction Sea’.” English Language Notes 57, no. 1 (2019): 116–28. https:// doi.org/10.1215/00138282-7309721. Fitzgerald, J.D. “Sydney: The Cinderella of Cities.” The Lone Hand 1, no. 1 (1907): 56–60. Foley, Dennis, and Peter Read. What the Colonists Never Knew: A History of Aboriginal Sydney. Canberra: National Museum of Australia Press, 2020. Gandy, Matthew. The Fabric of Space: Water, Modernity, and the Urban Imagination. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2014. Gergis, Joëlle. Sunburnt Country: The History and Future of Climate Change in Australia. Kindle Edition. Carlton: Melbourne UP, 2018.

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Giles, Paul. Backgazing: Reverse Time in Modernist Culture. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2019. Hannam, Peter. “Australia among Global ‘Hot Spots’ as Droughts Worsen in Warming World.” The Sydney Morning Herald, 2020, June 1. https://www. smh.com.au/environment/climate-change/australia-among-global-hot-spotsas-droughts-worsen-in-warming-world-20200601-p54ydh.html. Illich, Ivan. H20 and the Waters of Forgetfulness. Dallas: Dallas Institute of Humanities and Culture, 1985. Jeans, James. The Mysterious Universe. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1934. Jordan, Caroline. “Designing Women: Modernism in Art in Australia and the Home: An Australian Quarterly.” Art and Australia 31, no. 2 (1993): 200– 207. Karskens, Grace. The Colony: A History of Early Sydney. Crows Nest: Allen & Unwin, 2009. Keating, Christopher. Surry Hills: The City’s Backyard. Sydney: Hale & Iremonger, 1991. Leslie, Esther. “Ruin and Rubble in the Arcades.” In Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project, edited by Beatrice Hanssen, 87–112. Basingstoke: Bloomsbury, 2006. Levine, Caroline. Forms: Whole, Rhythm, Hierarchy, Network. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2015. MacDonald, Charlotte. Strong, Beautiful and Modern: National Fitness in Britain, New Zealand, Australia and Canada 1935–1960. Vancouver: UBC Press, 2013. MacQueen, Humphrey. Social Sketches of Australia 1888–2001. St Lucia: U of Queensland P, 2004. Marshall, Richard. Waterfronts in Post-Industrial Cities. London: Spon Press, 2001. Matthews, Jill Julius. Dance Halls and Picture Palaces: Sydney’s Romance with Modernity. Sydney: Currency Press, 2005. MacKay, Marina. Modernism and World War II. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2007. Mayer-Pinto, M., E.L Johnston, P.A. Hutchings, E.M. Marzinelli, S.T. Ahyong, G. Birch, and D.J. Booth. “Sydney Harbour: A Review of Anthropogenic Impacts on the Biodiversity and Ecosystem Function of the One of the World’s Largest Natural Harbours.” Marine and Freshwater Research 66 (2015): 1088–105. Mellor, Leo. Reading the Ruins: Modernism, Bombsites and British Culture. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2011. Mentz, Steven. At the Bottom of Shakespeare’s Ocean. London: Continuum, 2009a.

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———. “Towards a Blue Cultural Studies: The Sea, Maritime Culture, and Early Modern English Literature.” Literature Compass 6, no. 5 (2009b): 997–1013. Miller, Tyrus. Late Modernism: Politics, Fiction, and the Arts between the Wars. Berkeley: U of California P, 1999. Moody, Alys. “Untimely Modernism: Dodge Rose by Jack Cox.” Sydney Review of Books (3 May 2016). https://sydneyreviewofbooks.com/review/dodge-rosejack-cox-review/. Moore, Nicole. “‘To Be Rid, to Be Rid of It’: Abortion and the Cosmopolitan Modern in Dymphna Cusack’s Jungfrau.” Australian Studies 16, no. 2 (2001): 59–81. Morrison, Fiona. “Modernist/Provincial/Pacific: Katherine Mansfield, Christina Stead and Expatriate Home Ground.” JASAL 13, no. 2 (2013). https://ope njournals.library.sydney.edu.au/index.php/JASAL/article/view/9863. ———. “The Elided Middle: Christina Stead’s for Love Alone and the Colonial ‘Voyage in’.” Southerly 69, no. 2 (2009): 155–74. Muthu, Sankar. “Conquest, Commerce, and Cosmopolitanism in Enlightenment Political Thought.” In Empire and Modern Political Thought, edited by Sankar Muthu, 199–231. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2012. Patten, John Thomas, and William Ferguson. “Aborigines Claim Citizen Rights!: A Statement of the Case for the Aborigines Progressive Association.” 1938. https://trove.nla.gov.au/work/26332375. “Poor Men.” The Newcastle Sun, 1934, 22 November, 11. Rooney, Brigid. “Time’s Abyss: Australian Literary Modernism and the Scene of the Ferry Wreck.” In Scenes of Reading: Is Australian Literature a World Literature?, edited by Robert Dixon and Brigid Rooney, 101–14. North Melbourne: Australian Scholarly Publishing, 2013. Ryan, Simon. The Cartographic Eye: How Explorers Saw Australia. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1996. Saint-Amour, Paul K. Tense Future: Modernism, Total War, Encyclopedic Form. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2015. ———. “Weak Theory, Weak Modernism.” Modernism/Modernity 25, no. 3 (2018): 437–59. Smith, Ellen. “Local Moderns: The Jindyworobak Movement and Australian Modernism.” Australian Literary Studies 27, no. 1 (2012): 1–17. https:// doi.org/10.20314/als.927d4ae36b. Smyth, Rosaleen. “From the Empire’s ‘Second Greatest White City’ to Multicultural Metropolis: The Marketing of Sydney on Film in the 20th Century.” Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television 18, no. 2 (1998): 237–62. Stead, Christina. Seven Poor Men of Sydney. Carlton: Melbourne UP, 2015. Swyngedouw, Erik. Liquid Power: Contested Hydro-Modernities in TwentiethCentury Spain. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2015. Tennant, Kylie. Foveaux. Adelaide: Michael Walmer, 2014.

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The Home: An Australian quarterly. Sydney: Art in Australia, 1920. http://nla. gov.au/nla.obj-362409353. ———. vol. 19, no. 3 (1 March 1938). https://nla.gov.au:443/tarkine/nla.obj386031986. Walkowitz, Rebecca L. Cosmopolitan Style: Modernism Beyond the Nation. New York: Columbia UP, 2006. Watson, Bruce. Light: A Radiant History from Creation to the Quantum Age. New York: Bloomsbury, 2016. White, John. Journal of a Voyage to New South Wales. Project Gutenberg, 2003. http://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks03/0301531h.html. Winkiel, Laura. “Introduction: Hydro-Criticism.” English Language Notes 57, no. 1 (2019): 1–10. Woolf, Virginia. Selected Essays. Edited by David Bradshaw. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2009.

CHAPTER 2

The Origins of Australian Urban Modernity: Christina Stead’s Seven Poor Men of Sydney (1934)

There is no place in the estuary, though, so suited for an old tale as this fish-smelling bay, first in the port. Christina Stead, Seven Poor Men of Sydney (2015: 2) … the unplumbed depths of modernity—its irratio which has to be deciphered and made dialectical—really lie in the archaic, the mythological, the buried hosts of a past which is not yet past. [This deciphering] is an eminently political task … Christine Buci-Glucksmann, Baroque Reason: The Aesthetics of Modernity (1994: 48)

South Head is a literal and symbolic threshold into the city of Sydney. Formed from Hawkesbury sandstone exploded into dramatic cliffs by Jurassic period volcanic activity, it marks the point where harbour meets ocean. The Cadigal people named this place Mittala, Burrawara and Tarralbe, and it was integral to their work and culture (Derricourt 2010: 30). In 1790, the British signalled their successful invasion of the continent two years earlier by erecting on South Head the colony’s first flagstaff. Soldiers were stationed there to communicate with sea traffic, and to signal the settlement with news of desperately awaited supplies. Until air travel overtook the ocean voyage, South Head was the first sight of Sydney for all immigrants and returned travellers. In Christina Stead’s © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 M. Brayshaw, Sydney and Its Waterway in Australian Literary Modernism, Literary Urban Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-64426-0_2

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Seven Poor Men of Sydney, the headland serves as a threshold into the text. The opening passage of the book is worth quoting in full: The hideous low scarred yellow horny and barren headland lies curled like a scorpion in a blinding sea and sky. At night, house-lamps and ships’ lanterns burn with a rousing shine, and the headlights of cars swing over Fisherman’s Bay. In the day, the traffic of the village crawls along the skyline, past the lighthouse and signal station, and drops by cleft and volcanic gully to the old village that has a bare footing on the edge of the bay. It was, and remains, a military and maritime settlement. When the gunners are in camp, searchlights sweep over the bay all night, lighting bedrooms and the china on dressers, discolouring the foliage and making seagulls fly; in the daylight, when the red signal is flown over the barracks, the plates and windows rattle with the report of guns at target practice. From the signal station messages come down of the movements of ships and storms. Flags flutter and red globes swing on its great mast, which is higher than the Catholic Church, higher than the Norfolk Island pines, higher than the lighthouse and than anything else which is between the rocky cornice and the sandy seafloor. In dark nights, from the base of that enormous spectral pole which points up any distance into the starry world, one looks down on the city and northern harbour settlements, on the pilot-lights in the eastern and western channels, and on the unseen dark sea, where the lighthouse ray is lost beyond the horizon and where ships appear through the waves, far out, lighted like a Christmas Tree, small, and disappearing momentarily; and where, after half an hour of increasing radiance, the yellow rim of the great subtropical moon comes up like a lantern from underneath. (2015: 1–2)

Anyone familiar with South Head will recognise this place, but just barely: Stead’s dizzying accumulation of detail disorients our perspective as readers. A cavalcade of negative adjectives imbues the headland with uncanny, primal force. Even Stead’s description of workaday life in the harbour and South Head’s small fishing village is hard to place in time. Lights of both colonialism and modernity—ship’s lanterns, military searchlights, car headlights—swing over a scene that lurches from day to night and back again. The traffic that crawls along South Head Road seems to travel not only through space but through time; it passes by ‘the skyline, past the lighthouse and signal station, drops by cleft and volcanic gully to the old village’. This temporal displacement is accompanied by an emphasis on signs and signals, as Stead moves to describe the signal station and flagstaff, some version of which has always existed

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on South Head since 1790. Offering maximum sightlines to and from the sea, the signal station organises time and space, guiding ocean traffic, sending warnings, and alerting the city to the arrival of news, people and goods. In Stead’s description, the flagstaff ‘points up any distance into the starry world’, but it is also ‘spectral’. In the darkness, against the huge expanse of sky and sea, the machinery of the modern port city falters, becomes ghostly. The passage ends with uncertainty. As the lighthouse ray is ‘lost beyond the horizon’, ‘ships appear through the waves, far out, lighted like a Christmas Tree, small, and disappearing momentarily’. The Christmas tree simile suggests the ships are gifts, carrying new ideas and people to the antipodes. Yet these ships appear and disappear at will, far out and small in the ‘unseen dark sea’. This opening passage locates the reader in the unsettled space-time of Seven Poor Men of Sydney. On the second page, Stead writes that there is ‘no place in the estuary’, ‘so suited for an old tale as this fish-smelling bay, first in the port’ (2). This summative statement is both spatially and temporally dissonant. Sydney is not a city at all, but a ‘bay’, an ‘estuary’ and a ‘port’. Inviting alternate understanding of a key structuring location of modernity, the city is defined by its relationship to water, not solid land. Secondly, Stead names her narrative an ‘old tale’, a generic marker than seems unsuited to what will be a modernist novel of cosmopolitan concerns. This statement and the description that begins the book show how Seven Poor Men of Sydney views its titular city through the prism of multiple temporal identities: Sydney is at once a nineteenthcentury colonial port town, a dynamic estuarine environment of deep time and a burgeoning metropolis in the image of international urbanism. In this chapter, I argue that this spatio-temporal strangeness is productive, allowing Stead to examine critically Australian urban modernity, locate its origins and speculate about potential futures. Christina Stead’s first full-length novel was published in 1934, eight years after its author left Australia for Europe. Though not published here until 1966, it is now recognised as the ‘fons et origo of modern Australasian city writing’ (Hollington 2016: 689). In his early survey A History of Australian Literature (1962), H. M. Green questioned the novel’s approach and style while affirming its importance in the nation’s literary history. ‘Seven Poor Men of Sydney’, he wrote, ‘was somehow the first novel to convey an impression of Sydney as a world city, one of the foci of world life’ (1158). The novel shows Stead’s own interest in origins. Written largely from a distance about the place Stead was born

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and spent her formative years, the narrative begins in the years before Federation and signals in its first pages the nation’s move to Commonwealth status with an image of an old military colonial house, abandoned and falling into the sea. The bulk of the narrative is set in 1926, during the interwar boom, and emphasises the city’s developments in commerce, politics and culture. Yet this is interspersed with descriptions of poverty in slums unchanged since the nineteenth century, when visitors to Sydney remarked that the very young city resembled some of the oldest and meanest of its European counterparts.1 This combination of old and new delivers an image of an embryonic city that reaches towards modernity but remains rooted in the past. This chapter’s formulation of ‘origins’ as it applies to the novel and Stead’s engagement with Sydney aligns with Walter Benjamin’s definition of Ursprung as ‘origin’ with ‘nothing in common with genesis’ (2019: 24). Rather, origin is that which ‘originates in the becoming and passing away’: it ‘stands as an eddy in the stream of becoming and vigorously draws the emerging material into its rhythm’ (24). Any conception of origin must be responsive to the phenomenon’s ‘fore- and after-history’; it will always hover between restoration and ‘something incomplete and unclosed’ (25, 24). As the novel’s opening description attests, Stead’s palimpsestic Sydney seems simultaneously old and new, ordered and wild, progressive and archaic. Characters are future-oriented, but the trajectory of their narratives is largely regressive. The novel ends in defeat and mourning, but it revealed, for the first time, the capacity of Sydney and its waterway to generate and structure modernist narration. Walter Benjamin’s ‘archaeology of modernity’ with its effort to trace ‘errant negotiators between old and new’ had its roots in his earlier work on the Baroque trauerspiel , or German mourning play (Benjamin 1999: 25–26). The trauerspiel is the violent history play of the Second Silesian School that came into being after the Thirty Years War in the late seventeenth century. The trauerspiel was for Benjamin a key site of excavation for his archaeology of modernity. Like others at the time, Benjamin made a connection between the Baroque and the period in Europe immediately after World War I (Eiland 2019: xx), noting in his Origin of the German Trauerspiel that ‘in its brokenness and inner strife, the present age mirrors 1 Sue Doyle quotes a Sydney Morning Herald article from the early twentieth century, describing parts of inner Sydney as ‘exhibiting “the very worst conditions which are usually only associated with mediaeval cities of heavy antiquity”’ (2005).

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certain aspects of the spiritual constitution of the Baroque’ (2019: 38). For Benjamin, the formal and aesthetic manifestation of this parallel is the Baroque allegory, which becomes the focus of his Trauerspiel study and a guiding principle for his later investigations of avant-garde art, surrealism, and the commodity. Extrapolating the singular to the general without the cohesion or instantaneity of the classical symbol, baroque allegory glories in ‘ambiguity, multivalence … the abundance of meanings’ (Cohen, qtd. in Benjamin 2019: 187). ‘Allegories’, writes Benjamin, ‘are in the realm of thought what ruins are in the realm of things’ (188). The awkwardness of allegory—its overwrought piling up of image on image, with the construction showing through ‘like the masonry wall on a building whose plaster has begun to crumble’ (190)—leaves one caught between no meaning and an overabundance of meaning. Allegory then has an antinomical structure, holding within it both the hope of fulfilment through understanding and despair at its endless deferral (184). In this way, allegory is the best representation of Benjamin’s conception of natural history or nature-history, which ‘finds expression not as a process of eternal life but as a process of internal decline’ (190). Unstable, overburdened with meaning, resistant to easy interpretation, the baroque allegory resembles nature ‘as eternal transience’ (190). From Benjamin’s work on allegory, Christine Buci-Gluckmann locates at the heart of modernity what she calls ‘baroque reason’, ‘the reason of allegory and the Other, the reason of an unreconciled history’ (1994: 89). Baroque reason locks onto ambivalence, excess, antinomy, illusion and disillusion to trouble modernity’s linear continuum (39). In this chapter, I want to suggest that something akin to Buci-Glucksmann’s baroque reason accounts for the ‘old tale’ Stead tells about the young city. Aesthetically, the book has a baroque quality: in this her first novel, Stead’s style is not yet fully formed; it bears witness both to her youthful reading of nineteenth-century naturalism and her later admiration for James Joyce.2 The prose is marked by experimentation, expressionism, 2 Hazel Rowley (2007) describes Stead’s voracious and eclectic reading as a child and adolescent. She read Dickens, Henry Lawson and the rest of what she called the ‘stockwhip and wattle-blossom school’, learned passages by heart from Milton, Byron and Keats, and later loved Guy de Maupassant, Hugo and Zola (27–36). In a 1932 letter to her cousin Gwen, Stead gushed about James Joyce, whom she called the ‘new Euphues’: ‘no living writer in English there is who is not indebted to his methods and his vocabulary’ (Stead 1992: 1951).

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exuberant excessiveness; it is elevated by Stead’s luminous description but buckles at times under the weight of its verbose characters and lengthy sermons of sometimes confused tone and ideology. The narrative moves continuously between large sections of talk and restless walking, shifting indeterminately between movement and non-movement. Finally, the novel descends into an extended episode of metalepsis that stalls the narrative in a whirlpool of allegorical stories, some of which come close to being nonsensical. These stories culminate in the magisterial ‘In Memoriam’, a keening lament for the past that begins in deep time and flips the narrative trajectory to make the modern city only the current iteration of a centuries-long history of destruction wrought by colonialism and capitalism. Benjamin named as allegory par excellence the facies hippocratica, the death’s head that makes a mockery of human intentionality and reveals life as eternal transience (2019: 174). I want to suggest that the baroque intensity of Seven Poor Men of Sydney is generated by the waterway, which is for Stead not only a primal presence in the city but also a dynamic aesthetic force. Stead’s connection to the waterway is perhaps the most deeply felt and idiosyncratic of the writers featured in this book, and it accounts for the multiform, unstable register of aqueous metaphor that undergirds her first novel. Living for a number of her childhood and adolescent years on South Head, Stead claimed many times that the harbour had ‘formed her’ both as a person and a writer (Whitehead 1974: 230). In 1969 she wrote that she had been born ‘on the shores’ of an ‘ocean of story’, casting the harbour as point of origin for both life and language (1985: 4). For Stead the sea has a ‘voice … behind the language’, and as an adolescent she believed that by understanding it she could orientate herself to the world (2011: 258). On the ferry into the city, she wrote, ‘I used to think I could tell where we were anywhere in the harbour by the different water sounds round the beat’.3 Stead’s father was the naturalist and ichthyologist David G. Stead, and he taught his daughter to know the estuary as an abundant natural environment with a long history in deep time. Stead looked at fossils and knew that death was ever-present and ‘necessary for evolution to take place’ (1985: 5). She read On the Origin of Species alongside the Brothers Grimm and learned that like the fairy tale, evolutionary theory reveals an essential wildness at

3 Papers of Christina Stead, 1919–1996. MS4967. National Library of Australia.

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the heart of life. Her father’s packing case, filled with ‘things from the oceans around us’, contained not only whale teeth and spider crabs but also stranger, more grotesque items, not necessarily ‘from the ocean’ but certainly aligned with the excessive intensity Stead found in water: ‘the kneecap of some monster extinct millions of years before’, ‘dried human heads, shrunk, painted and with coconut fibre hair’ (1985: 4). Fiona Morrison’s recent monograph tracks the oceanic currents in Stead’s body of work, arguing convincingly for the ocean as a ‘point of genesis’ for Stead’s ‘worldly realism’, with its emphasis on ‘totality (epic scale), materiality (including economic life) and the vitality of incessant movement’ (2019: 23). Seven Poor Men of Sydney can be read for this worldly realism, but I want to emphasise its emplacement in the localised space of Sydney Harbour, and suggest that its energy is less oceanic than estuarine. Here, I draw on an understanding of the estuary as both open and closed, a transition zone subject to both oceanic and riverine influences, where the past remains active as sediment and silt carried by the tides. It is this estuarine energy that can be assimilated to baroque reason and the antinomical structure of allegory. In Seven Poor Men of Sydney, content and form are structured by aqueous dynamics of blockage and flow, submersion and elevation that correspond with the novel’s unsteady mix of hope and despair. The novel’s main metaphor is the ‘stream of light’ that bursts forth from barren land with transformative intensity. As a modernist image of progress and possibility (Matless 1992: 570–73), the stream of light reflects Stead’s emergent, evolutionist Marxism. It tallies with the novel’s almost evangelical faith in leftist politics, modern culture and science to make the city a utopia. However, the ‘stream of light’ is frequently dammed by the novel’s citation of the Tank Stream, a freshwater course from Sydney Cove that supported the fledgling colony until mismanagement and pollution meant it had to be buried as a sewer and then stormwater drain. In the novel’s first pages, Stead describes the ‘dead fish, swollen fruit, loaves, pumpkins, shoes and socks, broken straw-boaters’ cast up on the shore ‘from ships and sewers’ (3). Here, the dead, discarded and decayed return in an image of ‘eternal transience’ and ‘incessant decline’ (Benjamin 2019: 188, 190). There is also allegorical intention behind the novel’s frequent invocation of thirst and drowning, which speaks to the antinomical extremes of unfulfilled desire and overwhelming excess.

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In Seven Poor Men of Sydney, the waterway serves as ‘the unplumbed depths of modernity’, the baroque irratio that Buci-Glucksmann identifies ‘in the archaic, the mythological, the buried hosts of a past which is not yet past’ (1994: 48). The novel tracks the modern city’s development and has its characters espouse modern urbanism, but the waterway—as geographic entity and aesthetic principle—interjects with ‘the uncanny, weird principles of otherness, contradiction, ambivalence and catastrophe’ (Buci-Glucksmann 1994: 33–34). For Benjamin, excavating the baroque in modernity is ‘an eminently political task’, for its unstable interplay of emptiness and excessiveness ‘motivates thought to persevere’ beyond the phantasmagoria of linear, progressive history (Buci-Glucksmann 1994: 48, 172). In this chapter, I track the novel’s aqueous dynamics to show how Stead seeks to capture and make revolutionary modernity’s baroque intensities. Then, I show how the failure of this project sees the novel transform into a mourning story, in which allegory captures the ruin of the narrative’s hope for a revolutionised future.

Antinomies of Allegory: The Tank Stream Press If Stead’s wayward narrative can be said to have a central focus, it would be the Baguenault youths, half-siblings Michael and Catherine, and their cousin Joseph, who live or were born on South Head. Stead writes of the Baguenaults, There was a family there named Baguenault, who had settled in the bay directly after its arrival from Ireland thirty years before, and had its roots growing down into the soil and rocky substratum so that nothing seemed to be able to uproot it anymore, so quiet, so circumspect in the narrow life of the humble, it lived; but disaster fell on it, and its inner life, unexpressed, incoherent, unplanned, like most lives, then became visible as a close and tangled web to the neighbours and to itself, to whom it had for so long remained unknown. Who can tell what minor passions running in the undergrowth of poor lives will burst out when a storm breaks on the unknown watershed? There is water in barren hills and when rain comes they spurt like fountains, where the water lies on impermeable rocks. (3)

With tangled syntax Stead shows the ‘close and tangled web’ of a family submerged in the environment and their own poverty. This description of the Baguenaults responds to the novel’s dialectics of submersion and elevation, as the passage turns towards the hope that at least some might

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manage to disentangle themselves and rise above their limited circumstances. The image of the barren rock and rising stream is informed by Darwinian evolution and Marxist revolution, in particular Marx’s use of geological metaphor, most noted perhaps in his speech at the anniversary of the People’s Paper (1856). Marx refers to the revolutions of 1848 as ‘small fractures and fissures in the dry crust of European society’, that ‘betrayed oceans of liquid matter, only needing expansion to rend into fragments continents of hard rock’ (2000: 369). Stead’s image also conjures up the earthy, rocky barrenness of South Head to which she ascribes a special animism, suggesting that the Baguenaults represent a revolutionary paradigm in Australian modernity. In different ways, the three Baguenault youths all struggle between primitivism and enlightenment, despair and exaltation. As Catherine exclaims in words that might be directed to the world at large, ‘“Michael burrows into the earth, and he might go too deep. I fly off the handle. You’re killing us both!”’ (138). Michael grows with the city and the nation; his childhood is spent in the embryonic suburbs of north Sydney, he goes to war and returns to live a rootless, circumscribed existence in the city. Wandering seaside cliffs as a child he experiences moments of exuberant, frenetic wildness: Michael…often went to the verge of the highest cliff, sat under a sandstone boulder and looked out at the smooth blue sea and flawless sky, to feel adolescence creeping on him, and the surges of excitement which made him at one moment want to throw himself savagely at the lawny slopes and bite them, like an animal, and at the next, to leap from the cliff among the seagulls, ending fatally but sweetly in the sea. (10)

As an adult, this energy becomes entropic. Submerged in despair, Michael is stalled by what Buci-Glucksmann calls ‘the modern atrophy of experience (spleen, melancholy, ennui, emptiness)’ (1994: 97). Like Michael, Catherine is desperately restless in body and mind, ruled by ‘impulsive passions which ever strove with her intellect for mastery’ and cause in her mind ‘strange crosscurrents and maelstroms … storms not easily predicted but fated when seen’ (155). Yet she is also much more capable and committed than Michael, leaving him to wander by the waterway because she ‘“must go into the city and work”’ (36). Nevertheless, Catherine exists in a world still resistant to precocious and capable women, and she finds herself endlessly rebuffed: ‘You struggle and struggle for years

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to make a place for yourself; to work out your destiny, to justify yourself, and at the end, nothing is right’ (140). In their ungovernable passions, grief and transience, Catherine and Michael are modernist characters. Their cousin, Joseph, seems to hail from a different kind of narrative: complacent and cheerful, he grows up poor in Fisherman’s Bay and largely accepts his life without question. He does not rail against what he sees as a ‘natural order’ determined by class, wealth and education: ‘some [people are] predestined to high or low life’, he thinks, ‘grouchers only make it worse for themselves’ (86). He thinks he has a ‘sleeping seaside brain’, while Catherine assigns him a ‘“tranquil stupidity”’, and a ‘“submerged face”’ (86, 158, 159). But Joseph’s narrative arc is governed by both blockage and flow, submersion and elevation; as Catherine says, he is like the ‘“littoral, rising and falling”’ (159). The language used to describe the character suggests he may be capable of evolving: he is a ‘one-rooted plant’ whose life ‘must have been spent in a morass’, suggesting that he still has one foot in the ooze from which humans sprang, and may thus evolve into a different, more enlightened human being (188, 189). He is, as Dorothy Green explains, a ‘Nietzschean figure, a man in transit, walking the connectingrope between the animal and the Overman’ (2000: 64).4 Joseph benefits from an intellectual community, specifically his American mentor Baruch Mendelssohn, who teaches him politics, mathematics and science with faith that the younger man can grow and develop. ‘“Joseph does not exist,”’ Baruch says, ‘“but he can come to life. That strange, delicate, translucent mind, is a larva of a mind”’ (158). Nevertheless, Joseph still has to contend with an environment that hobbles his development as often as it offers opportunities for growth. When Joseph is read against the spatio-temporal context of Sydney in the mid-twenties, a narrative of becoming emerges that emphasises art, culture, science and community as keys to future progress for both people and the city. However, reading this narrative for its aqueous dynamics, we see that it is neither linear nor teleological. Both Joseph and the city may find the ‘water in barren hills’ and become something better, remain stagnate as a ‘sleeping seaside’ brain and place, or regress even further. 4 Given Nietzsche’s stated hostility to link the two theorists, although I them. In Nietzsche’s New Darwinism Nietzsche’s philosophy is informed by

towards Darwin’s theories, it may seem unlikely would argue that Stead sees no tension between (2004), John Richardson maintains that much of a grounding in Darwinian naturalism.

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The novel is structured by this connection between Joseph and Sydney. It is Joseph who takes the narrative into the space of the city in post-war modernity, and the book will end with him making the opposite journey. On the ferry to work, he muses on the view in a long passage Marjorie Barnard quotes in both her non-fiction books on Sydney as an example of the city’s especial beauty.5 The passage begins: O, lovely estuary with little hills, never to be approached, never to be altered in perspective, as if they sprang from the artist’s brain and straightaway came into life and breath upon canvas—but such canvas, as if blooming under glass, respiring and yet unearthly. (74)

There is affection for the city in Joseph’s vision, and at times his perspective suggests closeness, even a oneness with his surroundings, such as when ‘his mind floated out over the harbour and wove invisible skeins in the invisible fine air’ (86). At the same time, there is also a sense of unreality and distance: the view from the ferry is a picture, ‘never to be approached’. For Joseph, the city is a spectacle he does not question, and he remains somewhat oblivious to the various and pressing sociopolitical currents that swirl around him. He is susceptible to the church, where he is happy to dissolve into ‘nothing but a voice’ (85). When walking on Pitt Street, he ‘almost felt the ebb and flow of the markets’ as if in his bones (125). This willingness to be subsumed by capitalism and religion eventually brings to an end Joseph’s search for intellectual enlightenment. Stead describes a city congested with traffic, rain, and too many bodies pressed too closely together. Her Sydney is a ‘vapoury circus’ and a ‘house of smoky glass’ (188). Stead’s characters are physically vulnerable in this environment: they are dangerously thin, tubercular, with rotten teeth and worn shoes that leave their feet aching. They flow between the two extremes of Stead’s aqueous scale: hyperbolic metaphors see eager, learning minds watered by ‘fountains’ of knowledge and streams of enlightenment, but their sick bodies bend beneath the weight of Sydney’s torrential rainstorms and a poverty that means they must walk 5 Barnard seems to have remembered the passage for many years: it is singled out for

praise in Barnard Eldershaw’s Essays in Australian Fiction (176–177) and quoted again in her single-authored The Sydney Book (1947). In this short work, Christina Stead is the only Sydney writer referenced by name (11). Finally, Stead’s ‘lilied and reflectant tide’ from the end of the passage is invoked at the end of Sydney: The Story of a City from 1956 (79).

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through them rather than shelter in warmth (3). Joseph’s connection to a congested, steaming city has limited his bodily agency in the world: ‘he was dwarfed’, Stead writes, ‘and seemed to scramble along the street even when he walked straight ahead’ (70). As he walks to work, Joseph alters his gait to preserve his threadbare trousers and broken shoes, ‘all the time glancing up at the blue sky over the new bank buildings’ (75). He does not recognise the dissonance between his embodied experience of poverty and the soaring excesses of national and global capitalism, symbolised by the new bank buildings. Poor and with little opportunity for financial security, Joseph also harbours dreams of escape to the ‘old countries’, with ‘gilded domes, palaces, royal parks and hives of cities, bigger ports’ (86). Ignorant of the international reality of urban poverty, he longs for the glamour and grandeur of the European city. It is through Joseph that Stead depicts the machinations of capitalism in urban modernity. In one long scene, Joseph and Baruch walk down Pitt Street, the epicentre of consumer culture in Sydney. Stead delights in the plethora of adjectives available to describe the phantasmagoria of consumer capitalism: Splendid were the silver shops, with their iron grilles half-up already … Inside the lights shone brilliantly on the cases, the purple velvet necks decorated with pearl necklaces, and the numerous mirrors. (124)

Stead’s adjectives and adverbs—‘splendid’, ‘brilliantly’, ‘polished’, ‘numerous’—suggest positive abundance, compounded by the fact that we see the scene through Joseph, who has money in his pocket for the first time in months. This allows him to behave as the Baudelairean flâneur, who, Benjamin writes, ‘abandons himself to the phantasmagoria of the marketplace’ (1999: 14). No wonder then that Joseph barely attends to Baruch explaining the concept of ‘supply and demand’ as they walk (125). Below this ‘contradictory spectacle of modern urban life’ (Rooney 2000: 55) is irrationality, death and ruin where, as Benjamin writes, ‘Humanity figures […] as the damned (1999: 15). Thus, the ‘iron grilles’ of Stead’s description remind how easily poor men like Joseph can be shut out of this world. As he and Baruch venture into the more dangerous parts of the city, the ‘purple velvet necks’ take on a gothic undertone, strangely suggestive of bodies dismembered and displayed. This image is reminiscent of Benjamin’s understanding of fashion and the

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commodity as modern incarnations of the baroque allegory, governed as they are by endlessly cycles of replication and decay. In this ‘less frequented region’ near Paddy’s Market, prostitution, alcoholism and gambling are rife. Dull streetlight reflects in ‘a pool of blood on the pavement, with several clots’ (126). Joseph and Baruch look for the culprit: ‘a fight between bucks, a girl having a baby, a bleeding nose?’ (126). This commercial light of modernity reflects primal violence. Trying to reassure himself, Joseph thinks, This is my city, here I was born and bred, I cannot be lost here, nothing can happen to me. I am Joseph Baguenault of Fisherman’s Bay. I know the stones, the turnings; I know where the Markets are, there to the right and behind. (127)

Here, Joseph attempts to convince himself that he still knows his way through the labyrinthine city that has become, in an instant, dangerously unknown to him. These frequent dislocations—from joy to despair, familiarity to unfamiliarity—dramatise both the possibility and problems of modern urban life in Sydney. Joseph’s physical and metaphysical journeys through the narrative play out the novel’s mediation between a primitive past and an enlightened future. This narrative comes into sharper focus when we attend to Joseph’s workplace, the Tank Stream Press. Located close to Circular Quay in Lachlan (Macquarie) Place, the Tank Stream Press is one of the only places through which almost all of Stead’s wandering characters pass. It is also the only narrative location wholly invented, suggesting the important allegorical role it plays in the novel. The Press is named, of course, for the small stream of freshwater that guaranteed European settlement at Port Jackson. By the third decade of English occupation, government reports were citing the Tank Stream as ‘frequently polluted and rendered totally unfit’ for use by the burgeoning population.6 After the drilling of Busby’s Bore in the 1830s, the Stream became a stormwater drain; by the turn of the century, it was confined to brick culverts beneath the city’s surface, in which capacity it still exists today.

6 ‘Government and General Orders’, 15 Sept. 1810’, qtd. in Commission Appointed to Inquire into the Water Supply to the City of Sydney and Suburbs and New South Wales, 1869.

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Critics have focused on the Tank Stream as the setting for Stead’s critical assessment of modern labour conditions. Judith Barbour writes that printing in the novel ‘serves as the lifeless labour of the modern city man’ (1978: 408).7 I argue that the printery is more than a generic workplace; rather, it must be read in light of its production of printed matter and its namesake’s history. The printery’s functioning as a business and disseminator of culture is aligned with the Tank Stream’s various identities of life-giving freshwater supply, sewer and stormwater drain. At times, it seems as if culture and learning may usher in an internationalist, liberal and intellectual utopia; at others, the badly run printery suggests that all such hope is lost. Baruch has come to Sydney to look for enlightenment and he opines to Joseph that the young city could be an ‘adamant island, where the erudite lived and put the world to shame, told the truth to princes, and wrote tracts to enlighten the slaves’ (146). This vision of the city as a socialist, intellectual utopia imagines linear progress towards an almost classical conception of cosmopolitanism (Buci-Glucksmann 1994: 98). However, it forgets the ‘ur’ of modernity: the excess of history and its primal energies that reveal totality as an illusion (Buci-Glucksmann 1994: 47–48). Centralising aqueous dynamics of submersion and elevation, the Tank Stream Press enfolds culture, language, history and space into the narrative’s attempt to conceive of an alternative mode of urban modernity by working through the relationship between its buried past and its emergent future. The novel is centred on a printing house at a time when Sydney’s cultural industry, in the form of newspapers, magazines and commercial art—the latter two primarily produced by small printeries like the Tank Stream Press—was booming. This was a ‘newly international or transnational culture’, characterized by ‘cultural networks, communication circuits, and cultural flows in both or multiple directions’ (Carter 2013: xi). The Tank Stream Press produces political pamphlets for the Communist librarian Tom Winter, and at one point, a flyer advertising a lecture in modern physics at the University of Sydney attended by Joseph, his learned mentor Baruch Mendelsohn, and Catherine. The printery has just imported the latest press from Europe, and its printers read German printing catalogues. The narrative that circulates around the Tank Stream Press brings the local into contact with transnational socialist and other

7 See also Groth (2015).

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intellectual discourses, and links both to culture as a material, interactive force within the urban milieu. Yet Stead’s first description of the printery reflects the tank stream’s history as a sewer and drain, rather than its origins as freshwater stream. The Press is located in a ‘mouldy apartment’ and has a distinctive smell of old printing ink and urine from the water closet shared by all of the building’s occupants (75). This smell no doubt filters into the city at large via the building’s courtyard, which we are told opens out onto the street, perhaps recalling the way the Tank Stream originally flowed through the heart of old Sydney (75). The business is run by an ineffectual buffoon, Chamberlain, who ‘absorbs cash like dry-dust water’, and financed by a fraudulent capitalist, Montagu (200). Scenes set there are talk-heavy but what is said is inane, as readily discarded and polluted as the water below: ‘squint-eyed tales, clumsy business plots, mean usurious combinations between friends tumbled out of [the workers’] mouths like dirty bits of paper’ (113). In the building’s attic, a man does heliogravure—a photographic technique involving the layering of images that was outdated even in 1925. The office space is filled with ‘the usual broken chairs and outof-date telephone directories’ (75). These references to things damaged, disused and anachronistic carry with them suggestions of colonial lag. Nevertheless, Winter says, printing has influence, and for Joseph the business has promise and possibility beyond financial remittance (175). Joseph and the Tank Stream Press are intertwined. As though the smooth running of the printery also means steady progress and development for the character, Stead writes of Joseph, ‘his future was a procession of days, laying down line after line of clear print, with few errors, no doubt, each year a sheet sidling into place’ (87). Despite its squalor Joseph finds the workshop reassuring: ‘he sniffed the ink, the musky flooring, the faint familiar odour of urine, and his spirits rose’ (118). His work ‘relieve[s] him of a Promethean pain’; he has a lived, embodied connection to it, and to the words and language with which it brings him into contact (88). After receiving a German printers’ catalogue, Joseph notices the exceptional typography. To these words he imaginatively attributes vigour much greater than his own. Stead writes: These Germans, thought Joseph, understood that letters were not letters alone; they gave them characters. They are robust, brawny, squawk, joust, ride; they have pedigrees, religions, countries, political parties; they are dour, civic, frivolous, refined and oblique, square-footed, conservative and

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with money-bags; they have tongues and elbows, chitter, jostle each other too close at law, or march in open formation to make a show when they have little to say; they are disorderly and blatant for a bargain sale and, for a seizure, humdrum but with a lamentable look; they innovate, become austere, have rules of good taste unsuspected by the uninitiated, live altogether in a world of their own within our own. (87)

Here is the agency Joseph and his fellow poor men and women lack— these letters have the ability to move freely and with energy, to exert their influence upon the world, and upon the book: the description is one sentence stretched out across ten lines. Stead offers an image of the potential creative vitality and sociopolitical agency of the cultural product. Notably, however, a European firm, and not the Tank Stream Press, produced the catalogue that inspires in Joseph these visions of powerfully embodied language. Joseph finds himself lost in daydreams of the European printing industry. Stead writes: There are giant workshops with hundreds of men, artists, engravers, lithographers, electric etchers, suburb lights blazing like suns in the roof, workers shut off in gauze covers, benches yards long covered with clean trays of brilliant cast lead; linotypes by the half-dozen. There are great buildings for the printing of books and newspapers, where the lights burn all night, as if in a palace, and reporters and photographers run in shoals; where the news goes in towards the editor through circles of decreasing rewrite men, the seven spheres of editing, and runs out again through the corridors of the monstrous newsprint machines, through which printers wander as through a forest. (87)

Stead’s knowledge of the industry had a basis in reality, for during the drafting of Seven Poor Men of Sydney, she read the history and mechanics of printing (1992: 8). However, the long, adjective-laden sentences and repetitive structure imbue the scene with something other than industrial realism. This is a hyperreal vision of the healthy, powerful circulation of knowledge and culture. The ‘giant workshops’ and ‘great buildings’ of the industry are figured as an efficient hydrological system: there are ‘shoals’ of reporters and photographers, and ‘circles’ of writing, editing and rewriting. This is a stark contrast to the mouldy, urban apartment of the Tank Stream Press, words floating around it like ‘dirty bits of paper’, and the stagnant water for which it is named. Space and cleanliness are

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emphasised in this world where printers ‘run’ and ‘wander’, in comparison to the steaming, congested Sydney streets along which the sickly Joseph can only ‘scramble’. Even the so-called ‘monstrous’ newsprint machines are also ‘forests’. The scene is bathed in light—lights which ‘burn all night’, light ‘like suns’, turning factories and workshops into ‘palaces’, which is a remarkable upgrade from Sydney as a smoky house of glass. Stead writes of the industry at a time when the big printing firms, Linotype in the US and Monotype in the UK, rose to dominance and ‘made it possible for some people to make a living from words’ (Badaracco 1995: 1). This is something none of Stead’s characters manage in their work at the Tank Stream Press. Nevertheless, language and culture continue to provide Joseph with an avenue for thinking beyond his limitations. He harvests phrases ‘in foreign languages’, delighting ‘in the uncertainty of their meaning’: ‘they were abracadabra to show him he had power too, whenever he felt saddened by his smallness and weakness’ (84). In the midst of a busy, depressing day at the printery he reassures himself with ‘Labor omnia vincit’ (work conquers all) and ‘primus inter pares’ (first among equals), ‘the motto pompously introduced into a trademark on the sheet: the press repeated primusinterpares, primusinterpares’ (84). Seemingly referencing the reproducibility of art as a commodity form, the phrase loses meaning through repetition, which Stead emphasises by deleting the space between each word. The most compelling of Joseph’s harvested phrases is the one he recalls while walking to work: There was running through his mind at the same time a bright current of images which arose out of the sunshine and from one of his phrases, “Orta recens quam pura nites,” the legend of the New South Wales coat-of-arms which he saw on the Bent Street Library when he passed to go to the Cathedral. (86)

Notably here, it is a bright current of images Joseph sees, suggestive of a body of water moving in a definite direction. The legend from which these images spring translates in English as ‘newly-risen, how brightly you shine’. These are loaded words in the mind of a printer who works at the Tank Stream Press, in a book where the verb ‘risen’ is easily associated with the repeated motif of rising, surging water. Here, ‘brightly shines’ suggests light as a material representation of enlightenment. It is no coincidence that Joseph is furnished with the phrase by the library that

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would become the State Library of New South Wales, the city and state’s repository of local and international knowledge. Joseph’s commitment to the agency of words and printing is summarised by his conjuring from a newly-printed magazine the ‘bright features of an elzevir Utopia’ (86). The ‘elzevir Utopia’ is a paradise where work, words and culture come together, symbolised by the Dutch house of Elzevir, pioneering firm of the Enlightenment boom in printed matter. In one scene, Joseph and Baruch engage in a dialogue that extends the ‘elzevir Utopia’ into the space of the city by combining the technology of printing, nation-building and Stead’s (r)evolutionary model. Two pages are given over to direct speech as Baruch explains to Joseph the stranglehold of the church and capitalism on society’s development and the dissemination of ideas through it. The church, opines Baruch, keeps ‘printing-presses of its own’, thus maintaining power over communication (90). Government collaboration with the ‘uneconomic industries of cheap capitalists’ has thwarted the development of Australia as an ‘earthly paradise’ and instead left Sydney peopled by madmen and criminals (93). Joseph and Baruch have this conversation in Lachlan (Macquarie) Place, a symbolic space that serves in this and other Sydney fiction as a metaphorical crossway, where the city’s competing identities and histories jostle one another. Here, Stead negotiates with these narratives and puts forward her own image of ideal urban progress. In a telling metaphor for colonial development, as Baruch talks, Joseph exchanges his day-old newspaper for algebra problems set by the night class he attends. He struggles with them until Baruch steps into help. As Baruch explains it, algebra represents faith in rational thought as the building blocks of a logical, universal order. Baruch explains the algebra to Joseph by linking it to what the young man knows: the technology of printing, Baruch says, is just ‘ems and ens’, underpinned by the same basic mathematical principles as his algebra (98). All it takes is knowledge of something as simple as the number four: ‘“But take 4, a simple thing, a final thing,”’ Baruch says, ‘“Fortresses and palaces, railway lines, skyscrapers, are built through confidence in that principle”’ (97). In this dialogue, printing is linked to the city, the city to the nation, and all are enveloped in a narrative of progress through rational thinking and practical science. This image of totality imagines the city as a perfectly built machine. Baruch offers Joseph a way of reconfiguring the city’s ‘geometry of power’ (Massey 1994: 3). ‘“Grasp this,”’ Baruch encourages his pupil,

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‘“and you are on the road for the capital city, you can take the kingdom”’ (97). In 1925, if one had stood in Macquarie Place where Baruch and Joseph sit, and looked out towards Circular Quay, one would have seen there the cleared slums replaced by the foundations of the Harbour Bridge, marvel of modern engineering, symbol of the kind of urban progress described by Baruch, and the most distinctive ‘road’ in Sydney, Australia’s unofficial, cultural ‘capital city’. Rational thinking, pragmatic science, printing and urban design come together in an earnest, modernist vision of potential, and the potentially great antipodean city. However, this vision is somewhat undercut by the fact that the Bridge was built on borrowed funds that went unpaid through the Depression. In 1925, when Baruch and Joseph talk in Macquarie Place, one could have looked at the site of the fledgling bridge with hopefulness, or doubted whether its two halves were likely to ever meet in the middle. Nevertheless, Joseph, who has grown up in a Sydney of poverty and inequality, is enormously affected by Baruch’s vision of the utopian city, which also carries with it the socialist idea that the common man, armed with knowledge, can influence his surroundings. Language of water and fertility underpins images of Baruch ‘threshing out fine seeds of thought from the golden harvest in [Joseph’s] head, till his head overflowed again, and he sat chin-deep in a flood of exegesis which bewitched the pupil’ (97). This discourse culminates in the rising stream metaphor, as Stead writes that Baruch’s teaching has the powerful effect of freeing Joseph’s mind from its ‘conventional channel’, suddenly breaking open the rock so that understanding gushed out and watered earth barren and virgin. For a moment his eyes were opened, a pure stream broke through into the light, a new diagenetic principle began to work and he became aware of science, dimly, palely, because the light passed still through the clerestories of superstition; but it was as a ray of sunlight he had once seen crash through a memorial window in the village church … (99)

Stead echoes Exodus 17:6, in which Moses strikes the rock of Horeb and releases water for the people to drink, but recasts religious enlightenment in terms of scientific realisation. The ‘barren and virgin’ land of Joseph’s mind and the country he inhabits is watered by understanding, here figured as a ‘pure stream’ which breaks through ‘into the light’, recalling the Tank Stream Press and seemingly fulfilling the promise of his favourite

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phrase, the motto of New South Wales, ‘newly risen, how brightly you shine’. Joseph’s stream of light reminds him of the shaft of sunlight which he saw ‘crash through a memorial window in the village church’. Both images suggest the light waves of modern science replacing the conventions of religion, and the sacred architecture of the past supplanted by the ‘railway lines, skyscrapers’ of the future. Joseph’s ‘moment’ of eye-opening realisation takes place in what Benjamin would call the ‘now of a particular recognizability’, when the past and present come together in a flash (1999: 463). In this ‘now’, Benjamin writes, truth is charged to the bursting point with time. (This point of explosion, and nothing else, is the death of the intentio, which thus coincides with the birth of authentic historical time, the time of truth.) (1999: 463)

Joseph’s old way of understanding the world as an inflexible hierarchy built by religion and capitalism, is momentarily replaced with unexpected perception brought about by science and rational thought. In this moment, he is not the same person as he was walking Pitt Street, entranced by the spectacle of commodity capitalism. Yet, as Benjamin reminds us, such flashes of understanding are by their very nature fleeting, and Joseph’s was already precarious, appearing to him only ‘dimly’, ‘palely’, and still through the ‘clerestories of superstition’. He remains mostly in thrall to the various forces that keep him submerged. Accordingly, as he walks home that night, he is mocked by village children and unshaped by lengthening shadows: The accumulated misery, shame, hunger and ignorance of centuries straddled the path as he advanced against the evening sun, and they shrieked with laughter to see his hat getting taller in the new lamplight and his coat more uncouth as his shadow fell backward towards them. He was a stranger. (100)

Here, Joseph is bathed in artificial lamplight, no longer the ‘pure stream of light’. In comparison with the earlier, metaphysical vision of his expanding mind, this is an image grounded in the realities of ‘misery, shame, hunger and ignorance of centuries’, connecting him to a history of poverty rather than a vibrant future. The path of despair he now walks is an ironic reconfiguration of Baruch’s ‘road to the capital city’. Joseph

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himself recognises his stagnation: he ‘shambled shabbily on. How far was he from the bottom of the ladder? He was a long way from the top’ (117). In its infantile alliteration, Stead’s language reflects the ruination of Joseph’s life. ‘With the world organised into watertight compartments’, he thinks, ‘what chance had a dunce like him?’ (117). What chance too has the Tank Stream Press? It cannot run on Joseph’s fleeting idealism alone. Chamberlain, Montagu and the most self-interested of the printery’s employees, Withers, discuss ways to keep the business afloat. Chamberlain suggests printing ‘Little books of poetry, belles-lettres. The money’s safe, because the authors pay for their own costs’ (77). Withers knows a man who has ‘a market all over Europe’ for obscene books and suggests that might be a way to make a profit. Montagu is not particularly concerned for the future of the printery; he has his own stream of revenue through forging, importing and exporting antiquities and etchings. Montagu exploits the dreaming collective of modernity, selling art as a commodity item easily reproduced, mass-marketed and ultimately meaningless.

The Death’s Head of Modernity: Michael Baguenault The latter chapters of the novel move away from Joseph’s workaday world in the central city, returning often to the archaic village of Fisherman’s Bay, the wilds of the North Shore, the ‘dusty suburbs’ and other nonplaces of urban modernity. Key scenes take place at the Gap, ‘favourite suicide spot of the city’, and an Asylum on the banks of the Parramatta River (72). Even Sydney Harbour is cast as lawless and wild. This reoriented gaze corresponds with the narrative’s increasing chaos and fragmentation, as it loses the stability of Joseph’s focalising perspective. The change is marked and represented in miniature by a journey from the Cove to the outer reaches of the estuary. A large group of characters including Joseph, Baruch, Michael and Catherine take a launch south and alight at some ‘pleasure grounds’ on the banks of the Lane Cove River before returning to Sydney Cove late in the evening, where they witness the effect of the 1926 General Strike on the life of the harbour (196). The Lane Cove location Stead references here is most likely ‘Fairyland’, a recreation area established in the mid-nineteenth century that remained popular with picnicking Sydneysiders until the 1950s (Bernard). With painted fairy tale figures set among the eucalypts, Fairyland must have

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seemed a particularly transpicuous dreamworld. Nevertheless, the characters enjoy their time there; they laugh and shout ‘like a lot of cormorants quacking as they plane over the water for fish’, their troubles eased by ‘Country Night, with her uttering owls and pale surf of meteors’ (205, 206). When they return to the city that evening, however, the scene is one of abjection and toxicity as Stead describes the harbour stagnated by the seamen’s strike. The trip is Marlowe’s journey up the Congo River in reverse; here, characters return to the familiar harbour but find it a primal landscape transformed by socio-environmental disorder: They chugged between the dark fleets of ships tied up in the strike. A few lights hung among the decks and fell dully on the still dock waters. On one ship, bound for the islands, some savage sailors danced round a brazier placed over the hold, clapping their hands. At the sight of the girls and youths on the launch they cried out, laughing like parakeets, making obscene signs with their dark thin hands, their vertebrae and ribs standing out in the starved bodies as they rolled and gesticulated. Lascars in dirty rags hung over the high pontoon decks, silent, dark in the dark, only their yellow eyeballs rolling. A thicket of short masts stood up on the starry universe, the hawsers wheezed, the incoming tide clucked on the weedgrown rusting bottoms. A tug puffed beside a small vessel, chains clanked high, in the red light of a lantern, against the deep sky. The vessel was an island trader putting out with scab labour picked up round the wharves. They all looked at it with aversion as if at an unclean thing. (206)

Stead’s verbs—wheezed, clucked, puffed, clanked—suggest the ‘scab labour’ and broader efforts to break the strike have brought sickness and dysfunction to the harbour. Stead alludes to the ‘geography of European imperialism’ in descriptions of men ‘picked up’ in the Pacific islands to keep ocean trade moving despite the strike (Thacker 2016: 419). The avowed Marxists on the launch consider the foreign sailors ‘unclean’. Catherine calls them a ‘queer lot of men, castaways in a swarming harbour, a ship of the damned’ (206). With a kind of perverse envy, Michael imagines their lives: Can you imagine them eating together, sleeping together? The berths below teeming with lice, the food stinking in this weather, rations of rum served out to keep ‘em happy till they clear the Heads, and in the back of their heads the idea that when they get paid they’re going to clear out

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at the next port; no responsibilities and absolutely not wanted here: exiles. (206)

References to starvation and poverty may be extrapolated as a critique of capitalism, but Stead’s descriptions of the foreign labourers and lascars draw upon race to cast them as Other. Identified as ‘Fiji islanders’, the men are ‘savage’, ‘dark in the dark’, they have ‘yellow eyeballs’ and ‘dark thin hands’ (215). They are animalistic and assigned a grotesque sexuality as they gesture and shout at the white ‘girls and youth’ on the launch. These racialised allusions are especially notable when compared with Michael’s vision of the harbour the next day: The Turgot, a new motor-ship, carrying wool, which should have cleared at midnight and had been delayed by a sea-cook’s strike, went out, sailing into the morning before his eyes, taking the long Pacific swell across her bows, with the pilot-ship dancing before her like a cork on the water. The Turgot carried a Scandinavian crew which had not been affected by the general waterside strike. Now she danced out, with her tall, blond sailors on deck. Everything was pure and sweet that morning. (234)

It is easy to infer that what makes this scene ‘pure and sweet’ are the ‘tall, blond sailors’, unaffected by the strike. The twin spectres of colonialism and racism haunt Stead’s Sydney, as they do Australian modernism more broadly. The trip down the estuary transforms the Harbour into the River Styx, and it ferries the characters towards the loss of hope, life and sanity with which their narratives will end. This new mood returns Michael to the fore of the narrative, after he largely disappeared from the text while it explored modern work and culture with Joseph in the city. Michael is Joseph’s antithesis: if Joseph represents the possibility of progress for the city, then his cousin is its primordial energy. Where Joseph sees a ‘lovely estuary’ of ‘lilied and reflectant tide’ (74), Michael sees a ‘black sea and black harbour’ that ‘threaten the neck of land’ (256). While Joseph looks towards modern art, culture and science as the building blocks of a brighter future, Michael constructs a foundation myth for himself from the ‘old fashioned’ painting ‘Sons of Clovis’ by Éverariste Vital Luminais, displayed in the Art Gallery of New South Wales (216). It depicts the legend of the rebellious sons of King Clovis II, whose mother had them crippled and set upon a barge to float aimlessly down the Seine towards

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either death or salvation.8 Michael understands his own life through a portrait of physical objection, and an apocryphal legend of two hamstrung boys, hopelessly victim to the whims of the water. In the novel’s dramatis personae, the majority of the characters, including Joseph and Baruch, are identified by their professions, aligning them with the socio-economic theme suggested by the title’s ‘poor men’. In contrast, Michael is listed as ‘ne-er-do-well’, a term of archaic origin, and used in the nineteenth century to describe young middle-class British or Irish men sent to the colonies by their families to redeem themselves after some episode of ‘undesirable’ behaviour, a plan which was often unsuccessful (Kain 2015: 75). This archaic identifier—one that might be assigned to a character in a pantomime rather than a modernist novel— marks Michael out from the other characters. And indeed, from the earliest pages of the book Michael appears as the primal, desiring irratio of modernity. ‘I can’t believe I am anybody’s son’, he says as a child. ‘I feel as if I just grew out of myself’. (9). Michael’s aborted bildungsroman narrative queers linear temporality and the continuum of history.9 ‘I’m glad to know you’, Baruch says to him. ‘I know I’ve touched rock bottom. I can measure humanity upwards starting from you’ (254). If Michael has an origin, it is in the wave-tossed harbour. He understands his own nature through its ‘rages and revolts, his inconstancies through its tides, his longings through the bottoms grown with various plants and barnacles from foreign ports, and the turbines ploughing its waves’ (260). Michael looks at the city and does not see an ‘elzevir Utopia’ or ‘adamant island’; instead, ‘in the building materials of the city, in cast nails and puddles of lime, and underfoot, [he] saw a movement, a breathing, upwrenching, freeings and unhappy motion’ (277). In an early scene, Michael finds himself on South Head in the middle of a storm, drawn by the sight of the signal station’s flagmast, lit up among the darkness: It stretched up beyond its normal height into profound heavens where mists now bowled fast and dimly. In its mast and yards he saw the sign of his future, a monstrous pale tree, bitterly infinite, standing footless in the earth and headless in the heavens, a splinter sterile and sapless, a kind of

8 https://www.artgallery.nsw.gov.au/collection/works/712/. 9 See Esty (2012) for more on the aborted bildungsroman in modernist texts.

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scarecrow, a rack for cast vestments, a mast castaway: underneath the sea ran. (43)

As she did in the opening of the novel, Stead uses the signal station to centralise modernity’s unstable mix of order and disorder, control and chaos. Stead’s imagery here evokes Yeats’ characterisation of himself as a ‘comfortable kind of scarecrow’, and the ‘aged man … a tattered coat upon a stick’, who in ‘Sailing to Byzantium’, journeys by water to the great capital of the ancient world (Yeats 1994: 239). For Yeats, Byzantium represented the pinnacle of existence; there, ‘religious, aesthetic and practical life were one’, and ‘work of many […] seemed the work of one, that made building, picture, pattern, metalwork of rail and lamp, seem but a single image’ (Yeats 1989: 576). At the end of the poem, the persona leaves behind the decaying fleshly self, becoming instead an immortal aesthetic object, a bird of ‘hammered gold’ that sings to the ‘lords and ladies of Byzantium / Of what is past, passing and to come’ (Yeats 1994: 239). The imagery in Stead’s passage reverses this movement towards temporal order and spiritual redemption; the flagmast points the adolescent Michael towards death and fragmentation. This is affirmed by the last leg of his long ramble towards death: Michael travels from the Tank Stream Press to the Gap—from the place that offered Joseph his elzevir Utopia to one that in both name and history signifies an abyssal lack. Critics have read Michael’s death in many ways. Manfred Mackenzie reads it in terms of what he calls the ‘natural uncanny’, as symptomatic of ‘failed cultural nationality’ (1996: 154). Michael, Mackenzie writes, ‘would migrate himself nostalgically from the space-that-is-Australia back to a “Gothic” Euro-centre’ (155). Michael Ackland argues that the character is both ‘a naked, antipodean figure, awaiting formation, as well as an avatar of the Romantic legacy’, who ultimately dies due to ‘intense self-absorption’ (2008: 200). I want to assert that Michael’s death is not symbolic but allegorical. He is the ‘death’s head’, the facies hippocratica that reveals ‘history as a petrified primal landscape’: History, in everything untimely, sorrowful, and miscarried that belongs to it from the beginning, is inscribed in a face—no, in a death’s head. … This is the core of the allegorical vision, of the Baroque profane exposition of history as the Passion of the world—meaningful only in the stations of its decline. (Benjamin 2019: 174)

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Against Stead’s pursuit of enlightened discourse and culture capable of liberating the mind from its physical limitations, Michael’s death in both its actuality and its poetics represents the novel’s loss of faith in its own telos, its exhausted acceptance of modernity as decay and destruction. The affective pull of Michael’s death is somewhat blunted by readers’ forewarning that the event is destined to become the stuff of village gossip and spectacle. Early in the book, passengers on the morning ferry cheerfully discuss the latest death by water. ‘A suicide at the Gap was a commonplace affair’, Stead writes: Everyone knew why a person committed suicide: if it was a man, because he couldn’t pay his bills or had no job; if a woman, because she was going to have a baby. The boat chugged into town through the glaze of the harbour on the darlingest, dazzlingest day of spring. (73)

On the same page Stead describes a shark attack. A motley group consisting of small children, a fisherman with a foot rotten from a stingray puncture, and ‘three nuns in black’ gathers at the Gap to see the carcass and hear the tale: It was a sort of dumb-show, the lazy men walking with heads dropped, their time- and weather-beaten faces, naturally sad and grotesque, now creased with interest as if they went to an entertainment, but not a new one. (73)

Michael’s death must be read in the context of these earlier scenes. They lend it what Buci-Glucksmann calls the ‘peculiar seductiveness’ of baroque allegory, in which ‘the primacy of the aesthetic—of appearances and play—joins up with metaphysical wretchedness on the ground of grief or melancholy’ (1994: 71). Stead’s writing of the death scene is theatrical but not devoid of pathos: The wind sways him like the rooted plants and grasses, whistles through his hair as through the pine trees opposite: he is already no longer a man but part of the night. The pine trees crowded him to the ledge, the light wheels, down under is the howling parliament of waters deciding on his fate. The gusts on rock and ledge as spirits hold his heart in their shadowy hands and squeeze the blood out of it; darkness only runs through his veins now. He takes a step nearer the edge, and at the same moment this idea splits him from head to foot “What if I should fall upon a rock?”

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He falls into the sea, the wave a moment later cracks his skull against the submerged pediment of the cliff, and his brains flow out among the hungry sea-anemones and mussels. It is done; all through the early morning the strings of the giant mast cry out a melody, in triumph over the spirit lost. (261)

The switch to present tense interrupts the novel’s temporality as the ‘parliament of waters’ take over. Michael’s skull cracks and he disperses into the primal undertow from whence he came. It is a macabre perversion of the question with which the Baguenault narrative began: ‘Who can tell what minor passions running in the undergrowth of poor lives will burst out when a storm breaks on the unknown watershed? There is water in barren hills and when rain comes they spurt like fountains, where the water lies on impermeable rocks’ (3). That question inaugurated Stead’s Marxist hope, but Michael’s death as allegory ‘explode[s] the Marxisms of progress and replace[s] them with a rent Marxism, a Marxism of rending’ (Buci-Glucksmann 1994: 48).

What History Is That; What Enigma Is That? Soon after Michael’s death, Catherine voluntarily confines herself to an asylum. Before their embryonic community is irreparably dissolved by Baruch’s expatriation to Europe and Joseph’s retreat to middle-class suburban mediocrity, the characters unite to visit Catherine at what Stead likely intended as the Gladesville Mental Hospital, Sydney’s first psychiatric care facility. The hospital had its grounds right on the banks of the Parramatta River, which Stead uses to effect when the characters settle in a ‘grassy wilderness … beside a rivulet spanned by a rustic bridge’ (312). This is an appropriate setting for the scene that follows, when a game of round-robin storytelling intended to cheer Catherine swiftly descents into a whirlpool of highly allegorical, expressionist stories. In one tale, a mythical black stone is recovered in the heart of Australia. The stone is said to bear five words which hold the key to all of life’s mysteries. The five words turn out to be meaningless: ‘Io an qanat, reed pariah!’ (315). The phrase makes a mockery of Joseph’s commitment to language, reminiscent as it is of another five words inscribed onto stone, ‘orta recens quam pura nites’, which evoked hope for both the man and the city. The language

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that endures, which haunts the end of the book, is the language of allegory, which proclaims ‘the imperfection and brokenness of the sensuous, of the beautiful physis’ (Benjamin 2019: 186). At the conclusion of the allegorical sequence, Kol Blount delivers a eulogy for Michael. Spoken in his voice, the memorial address reanimates Michael’s broken corpse to tell a watery origin story of the continent that designates urban modernity the end result of European imperialism as violent rupture in the history of the Southern Hemisphere. The tale begins by fusing evolutionary fact with mythic imagery: ‘When in the dim ante-glacial world, monsters rampaged in mountains and seas, a white body rolled in the leaden flow, a nameless land rose from the steamy abyss, awash, awhist and away’ (319). However, the usual association of the unknown Southern land with monsters and chaos is subverted as the tale catalogues the abundant life found on the continent during the multimillennial span of sole Aboriginal occupation: He looked forth over the thousand-isled Pacific which ten years could not explore, strewn with reefs and beaches at the sky with stars, and the foam of the coral reef like the Milky Way; and saw the tides and seasons changing with the moon, not wild, but with a mild and musical flow, filling the bays and lagoons with green weed, nacreous shells, fish and cuttlefish, over which the sun rose bright and dripping with dew from the seas and sand-dunes. (319–320)

Kol’s address posits decline and destruction as the consequences of European imperialism. The lament continues: Catholic Spain, proud Portugal, sent their sailors steering for Solomon’s Isles, the Moluccas with fruits and china bells, and the jewels of the unconquered uncatholic uncommerced new world. Captains from Holland and the North Sea unwound their wakes upon the waters of the world. Fires were lighted, murder done, ships cast away, cargoes plundered, robbers clothed in sick, rafts seaswept, women lost, sacrosancts profaned, mutinies smothered, hostages taken, chartings made, short-lines plumbed, reefs struck, wreckers enriched, the Chinese rolled from port to port, the Kanakas perished in the cane, mountain bluffs were climbed, the blackfellow destroyed, the plains bore flocks, the desert of spinifex sprouted gold, the new world began. (321–322)

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It is the act of remaking the Southern world in a European, imperial mould that brings destruction to the ‘water-hemisphere’; the colonialcapitalist enterprise delivers to Australia ruin and dislocation. This culminates in the ‘notable pioneer tale’ that tells not only of ‘labour in common, broad wheatlands, fat sheep, broad cattle-barons, raw male youth and his wedding to the land’ but also ‘starvation, sorrow, escapades, mutiny, death’ (322). The ‘notable pioneer tale’—bringing to mind ‘traditional’ bush-based Australian literature—then morphs into a modern narrative—the modernist narrative of Seven Poor Men of Sydney—that tells of the ‘over-populated metropolis … the suicide of youth, the despairs of the heirs of yellow heavy-headed acres’. Kol concludes with questions that might be asked of the book as a whole: ‘what history is that; what enigma is that?’ (322). The final scene of the narrative proper pairs Baruch, the learned Marxist, with Catherine, the restless woman. Catherine certainly qualifies as a main character, but she does not appear in the dramatis personae. Instead, she functions throughout the narrative as a present absence, floating in and out of scenes, seeking in turn intellectual enlightenment like Joseph or spiritual release like Michael. Her final encounter with Baruch rehearses the central tension of the book and makes clear Catherine’s important position within it. Baruch is sailing for Europe and towards the enlightenment he has decided cannot be found in the antipodes. ‘Ranke, Fustel de Coulanges, Marx, all that is going on, I will have at my finger-tips’ he tells Catherine, ‘in ten years I will be a citizen of a future state’ (324). Catherine does not share Baruch’s optimism. ‘While you spoke,’ she says, “I saw as a door open in your speech, leaves drifted in and outside were barren leaves, and nothing but the white bones of death everywhere. I have nothing to look forward to … Nothing can satisfy my spleen but to fall into the terror beyond death, but let me only escape the terror of living through so many unhappy loves.” (324)

Catherine finds in Baruch’s future state only barren hollowness and waiting death. This death is held in tense relation with the unfulfilled desire of her ‘unhappy loves’. Catherine expresses this discord by cutting her wrist, crying out to Baruch that his ‘renaissance is too hard for me, there are too many pangs’ (324). This act of self-injury is an expression of all that modernity seeks to repress. Already displaced in a novel

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named for its men, Catherine’s body manifests ‘extremes of desire and death, vitality and lifelessness’, becoming a physical manifestation of the ‘petrified unrest’ of modernity (Buci-Glucksmann 1994: 104).

Conclusion: Mourning Modernity Joseph finds himself unmoved by the stories in the asylum. ‘They are all throwing fits and I am calm’, he thinks, ‘a dummy, but calm’ (318). Joseph is calm because he has accepted his fate as a poor man in a small place. ‘History is at a standstill with me’, he thinks, There are—as they say in the Bible—hierarchies and hierarchies over me economically and intellectually, and I shall never rise against them. … I am a machine. I am the end of my race. (330)

No longer grasping towards the stream of light which shone upon a different way of being, Joseph is content to stay still. He returns to religion and accepts a social order that positions him at the bottom of the ladder. In his memoriam, Kol questioned the enigma of history, but Joseph knows ‘history is at a standstill’. Not for him any more are those moments of awareness and knowledge capable of interrupting this empty, linear time. The novel concludes with Joseph in a short end-piece that sees him walking home to his stucco cottage on the Heights, years after he first took the narrative into the city through the ‘lovely estuary’ of Sydney Harbour. Reminiscent of the novel’s opening evocation of the headland as both familiar and uncanny, this end-piece settles and unsettles the reader’s relationship to the text. The word ‘end-piece’ suggests a neat bracketing-off, as does Joseph’s walk home to his comfortable, conservative cottage. However, this slight present-tense addendum offers not totality and conclusion but fragmentation and open-endedness. It speaks not of survival but of mourning. The novel’s opening passage draws its energy from multiple sources of light that symbolise Sydney’s history and modernity, its military significance and its orientation to the wider world. It highlights the city’s still-mutable, multi-temporal identity. In the end-piece, this mutability is primal, malevolent:

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Last night the storms gathered round the moon and the wind blew whirling cones of sand and dust about. Over Middle Head was the pale rosy light of the bushfires. The trees raged in the park, which is always turning back to wilderness; they lifted their arms and tossed in the darkness of the under-cliff. The souls of trees are freed in storms, they struggle, arise and commingle in the lower air. Wild flutings, reedy laments and cries of inhuman passions fill the ear. The gale trumpets in the distance, and they tremble as if before the trampling of Sabaoth. Let the windbuffeted man run past with his overcoat squatting on his back and his hat running along of itself before him; he is out of his elements. The children of the storm strain and howl, taking no notice of him and oblivious of his world in their recital of lugubrious mysteries, earthy deeps, lost rivers and subterranean caverns. (331)

After the failure of the ‘pure stream of light’ to rise up and transform the life of the city and its inhabitants, the only illumination is provided by an ‘ill-willed moon’ and the ‘pale rosy light of the bushfires’ (331–32). This reference to bushfire reaches forward to a future where the ecological violence of modernity will beget fires of greater intensity and destructive power. Stead’s narrative is full of the sounds of the city, of ‘hammering and tapping’, of the printing press at the Tank Stream printery and the ‘chink, chink, chink, clink-a-clink, chink’ of money from an offertory box into the priest’s hand (327, 328). Here, however, the night is given over to the sounds of the sea and wilderness, to ‘lugubrious mysterious, earthy deeps, lost rivers and subterranean caverns’. This is the otherness below the surface of the city—we think of the Tank Stream confined to brick culverts beneath the street—that narratives of progressive modernity try to repress, and that Stead’s own programme of intellectual idealism tried to rationalise and harness for sociopolitical development. Here, otherness speaks into the night as the narrative encourages the Pacific Ocean to ‘Roar on’ (332). In the wind, ‘the leaves clashed together with their opening cry, “Kastelaison, Kastelaison”—What is the history of Kastelaison?’ (331). The history of Kastelaison is accumulative despair: as Benjamin wrote in an early essay, ‘It is a metaphysical truth that all nature would begin to lament if it were endowed with language’ (1979: 121). In Stead’s novel, the natural world of the end-piece takes over where Kol’s eulogy left off, lamenting the violence and destruction of the colonial-capitalist enterprise.

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The end-piece is dominated by an image which critics have read as ‘the book’s formal correlative’ (Bindella 1991: 96).10 It is a great web strung out across the sky, woven together by the flying bodies of Joseph’s lost friends: Between Jo … and the nearest star something moves which may be a silk mesh such as conjurers used. Underneath is a giant gulf in which rushes the sea: the stars appear therein with intermittent flashes. The threads of the mesh appear and are woven of the bodies of flying men and women with the gestures interlocked in thousands of attitudes of passion. Thought flies along their veins, they move and gesticulate with old motions lost in memory. (332)

The threads of this mesh swing out into space, where they are caught by a wind and ‘wither and fall apart like thin dry leaves’, falling to earth and into the sea (332). The mesh reflects the novel’s aesthetic and ideological imperatives: Seven Poor Men of Sydney offers the possibility of progress, hope and utopia in a future based on committed community, transnational intellectual exchange, enlightened culture and science. However, Stead loses faith in this project, the twin illusions of telos and logos are destroyed, and the narrative disintegrates in the same way the mesh does. The mesh is also Joseph’s last flash of understanding: ‘That was long ago’, he thinks, ‘Now it is only like a dream from which you awaken and feel tremulously near to tears without knowing the reason …’ (332). Despite his capitulation, Joseph still has the ability to wake to the reality of the world and mourn the loss of his own potential. Once he reaches home, and sits down at the hearth with his wife after inadvertently carrying some of the broken leaves of the mesh into the house with him, Joseph begins the story of the novel again: ‘“We were seven friends, at that time, yes, seven poor men …”’ (333). In 1974, forty years after the book was published, Stead spoke to Anne Whitehead about her first novel. Joseph, Stead said, was the character she ‘felt most deeply about’: the man who had ‘no beliefs, no position, no hope, but kept on bravely. He’s the real hero of the book’ (Whitehead 1974: 241). What bravery is there in Joseph? Why was he, for Stead at the end of her career, the ‘real hero’ of the book? I would argue that Joseph’s bravery is to acknowledge that there is no simple, eschatological path of 10 See also Kirkpatrick (2000): 67.

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progress; rather, that modern life is bound up with loss: ‘They cannot have a sequel’, he thinks, ‘the creatures of our youth’ (333). Joseph’s act of heroism is to know that a story of mourning is the only appropriate narrative, and to tell it anyway. Stead’s use of the word ‘sequel’ makes us think of the book as a whole, and its own mourning story. Seven Poor Men of Sydney struggles between idealistic visions of what the city in urban modernity could be, and unavoidable awareness of what it is. In the end, Seven Poor Men of Sydney seems to echo the lament of youthful Michael: ‘I see no will or obedience in anything’, he says, ‘water is water’ (293). Yet the watery portrait painted by the novel opens the city up to a new mode of narration, a boldly modernist vision of what is possible in Australian urban fiction. This is the stream of light it offers, and that flows through each of the chapters that follow.

Works Cited Ackland, Michael. “‘What a History Is That? What an Enigma…?’: Imagination, Destiny and Socialist Imperatives in Christina Stead’s Seven Poor Men of Sydney.” Southerly 68, no. 3 (2008): 189–212. Badaracco, Claire Hoertz. Trading Words: Poetry, Typography and Illustrated Books in the Modern Literary Economy. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins UP, 1995. Barbour, Judith. “Christina Stead: The Sublime Lives of Obscure Men.” Southerly 38, no. 4 (1978): 406–16. Barnard, Marjorie with Drawings by Sydney Ure Smith. The Sydney Book. Sydney: Sydney Ure Smith, 1947. ———. Sydney: The Story of a City. Melbourne: Melbourne UP, 1956. Benjamin, Walter. One-Way Street and Other Writings. Translated by Edmund Jephcott and Kingsley Shorter. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1979. ———. The Arcades Project. Translated by Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin. Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard UP, 1999. ———. Origin of the German Trauerspiel. Translated by Howard Eiland. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2019. Bernard, Peter. “Snippets and Tips: Park Stories.” http://www.friendsoflaneco venationalpark.org.au/Snippets&Tips/FairyStory.htm. Bindella, Maria Teresa. “Searchlights and the Search for History in Christina Stead’s Seven Poor Men of Sydney.” Australian Literary Studies 15, no. 2 (1991): 95–106. Buci-Glucksmann, Christine. Baroque Reason: The Aesthetics of Modernity. Translated by Patrick Camiller. London: Sage, 1994.

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Carter, David. Always Almost Modern: Australian Print Cultures and Modernity. North Melbourne: Australian Scholarly Publishing, 2013. Commission Appointed to Inquire into the Water Supply to the City of Sydney and Suburbs and New South Wales. Sydney Water Supply: Report of the Commission Appointed to Inquire into the Supply of Water to Sydney and Suburbs. Thomas Richards, Government Printer, 1869. Doyle, Sue. “Doomed Streets of Sydney 1900–1928: Images from the City Council’s Demolition Books.” Scan 2, no. 3 (2005). http://scan.net.au/ scan/journal/display.php?journal_id=64. Derricourt, Robin. “The South Head Peninsula of Sydney Harbour: Boundaries in Space and Time.” JHRAS 96, no. 1 (2010): 27–49. Eiland, Howard. “Translator’s Introduction.” In Origin of the German Trauerspiel, by Walter Benjamin, xi–xxiii. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2019. Eldershaw, M. Barnard. Essays in Australian Fiction. Melbourne: Melbourne UP, 1938. Esty, Jed. Unseasonable Youth: Modernism, Colonialism, and the Fiction of Development. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2012. Green, Dorothy. “Chaos or a Dancing Star? Christina Stead’s Seven Poor Men of Sydney.” In The Magic Phrase: Critical Essays on Christina Stead, edited by Margaret Harris, 58–70. St. Lucia, Australia: U of Queensland P, 2000. Green, H.M. A History of Australian Literature, Pure and Applied. Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1962. Groth, Helen. “Modernist Voices in Christina Stead’s Seven Poor Men of Sydney.” JASAL 15, no. 1 (2015). http://openjournals.library.usyd.edu.au/ index.php/JASAL/article/view/9932/9820. Hollington, Michael. “Australasian City Writing.” In The Palgrave Handbook of Literature and the City, edited by Jeremy Tambling, 687–705. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016. Kain, Jennifer. “The Ne’er-do-well: Representing the Dysfunctional Migrant Mind, New Zealand 1850–1910.” Studies in the Literary Imagination 48, no. 1 (2015): 75–92. Kirkpatrick, Peter. “Walking Through Seven Poor Men of Sydney.” In Australian Writing and the City: Refereed Proceedings of the 1999 Conference Held at the New South Wales Writers’ Centre Sydney 2–6 July 1999, edited by Francis De Groen and Ken A. Stewart, 62–67. Sydney: Association for the Study of Australian Literature, 2000. Mackenzie, Manfred. “Seven Poor Men of Sydney: Christina Stead and the NaturalNational Uncanny.” Southerly 56, no. 4 (1996): 201–18. Marx, Karl. “Speech at the Anniversary of the People’s Paper.” In Karl Marx: Selected Writings, edited by David McLellan, 368–69. Oxford, UK: Oxford UP, 2000. Massey, Doreen. Space, Place, and Gender. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1994.

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Matless, D. “A Modern Stream: Water, Landscape, Modernism, and Geography.” Environment & Planning D: Society & Space 10 (1992): 569–88. Morrison, Fiona. Christina Stead and the Matter of America. Sydney: Sydney UP, 2019. Papers of Christina Stead, 1919–1996. MS4967. National Library of Australia. Richardson, John. Nietzsche’s New Darwinism. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2004. Rooney, Brigid. “‘A Little Bit of the Real Sydney’: Comparing Gender, Socialism and the City in Works by William Lane and Christina Stead.” In Australian Writing and the City: Refereed Proceedings of the 1999 Conference Held at the New South Wales’ Writers Centre Sydney 2–6 July 1999, 54–61. Sydney: Association for the Study of Australian Literature, 2000. Rowley, Hazel. Christina Stead: A Biography. Carlton: Melbourne UP, 2007. Stead, Christina. Ocean of Story: The Uncollected Stories of Christina Stead. Edited by R. G. Geering. Ringwood: Viking, 1985. ———. A Web of Friendship: Selected Letters (1928–1973). Edited by R. G. Geering. Pymble: Angus and Robertson, 1992. ———. Seven Poor Men of Sydney. Carlton: Melbourne UP, 2015. ———. For Love Alone. Carlton: Melbourne UP, 2011. Thacker, Andrew. “Woolf and Geography.” In A Companion to Virginia Woolf , edited by Jessica Berman, 411–25. West Sussex: John Wiley & Sons, 2016. Whitehead, Anne. “Christina Stead: An Interview.” Australian Literary Studies 6, no. 3 (1974): 219–24. Yeats, William Butler. Yeats’ Poems. Edited by A. Norman Jeffares. London: Macmillan, 1989. Yeats, William Butler. The Poems. Edited by Daniel Albright. London: J.M. Dent, 1994.

CHAPTER 3

Science, Everyday Experience and Modern Urban Women: Dymphna Cusack’s Jungfrau (1936)

The problem of the scientific world is part of a broader problem—the problem of all experience. Experience may be regarded as a combination of self and environment, it being part of the problem to disentangle these two interacting components. Life, religion, knowledge, truth are all involved in this problem, some relating to the finding of ourselves, some to the finding of our environment from the experience confronting us. Arthur S. Eddington, The Nature of the Physical World (2014: 324)

Would the subtleties of philosophies, the probings of psychoanalysis help any more than the dogmatism of creeds? Would the secret lie perhaps beyond all these—somewhere in realms only dimly realised, vaguely explored? Dymphna Cusack, Jungfrau (2012: 72)

In the opening scene of Dymphna Cusack’s Jungfrau (1936), twentyfive-year-old Thea Mackinley sits in her room in an inner Sydney building with her friend Eve, smoking and considering the word ‘reality’. Four questions punctuate the first two lines of the novel, all amounting to the same philosophical quandary: What is reality? Thea feels the concept has lost all meaning; the word runs ‘around her mind like the smoke drifting across the room in thin grey spirals’ (2012: 1). The spiral, of course, © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 M. Brayshaw, Sydney and Its Waterway in Australian Literary Modernism, Literary Urban Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-64426-0_3

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is omnipresent throughout the universe, a shape basic to phenomena as diverse as pine cones and galaxies. One of the great, unsolved mysteries of physics is whether the spiral’s ubiquity is meaningful or simple coincidence. Thus Thea’s smoke spirals, emerging and fading in the air, suggest her inability to answer the elementary yet essential question that plagues her. Her musings continue: Real. Back to it again! Real, reality. Yellow light shining on wooden desk, showing up every grain, fixing its outline sharply, accurately. Was this reality, or the swirling atoms or molecules or whatever they were, that silently, invisibly, inexorably, were undergoing change and dissolution within the desk? Which was more real? The rusted line of spouting cutting the skyline beyond the window, or the low arch of stars hanging miraculously between roof and roof? (2)

Without a satisfactory answer to the question of reality’s true nature, Thea cannot properly locate herself in her environment, and thus suffers from intense psychic displacement. This passage, with reference to atoms and molecules and its example of the apparently ‘solid’ desk, could come from any number of popular science texts that circulated in the wake of Einstein’s discoveries. In that age of quantum physics and relativity, as Arthur Eddington wrote poetically in 1929, ‘we are haunted by the word reality’ (2014: 322). Cusack read this sentence, and it is likely that it informs the opening scene of her novel. As the scene continues, we learn the origins of Thea and Eve’s discussion: Thea, bored with her life as a teacher, is contemplating an affair with a married man, a professor of English named Owen Glover. Eve, a pragmatic, religious doctor, does not approve. She accuses Thea of being ‘out of touch with reality’ (1). Her interpretation of the word has nothing to do with atoms and molecules, and everything to do with social convention. ‘You’ll get yourself talked about’, she tells her friend, ‘and probably lose your job—’ (2). Thea does not care. For her, reality is a nebulous, malleable thing: it leads to existential angst, but it may offer freedom if one is brave enough to exploit its opportunities for change. ‘I’m going to take life’, she says, ‘use it—now, instead of letting it use me’ (4, emphasis in original). ‘I’m sick of safety’, she continues, ‘Tired of working to pattern—of running in the same narrow groove’ (4). This opening scene effectively introduces the dual, intertwined concerns of Cusack’s novel. On the one hand, Jungfrau aims to convey

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realistically the lives of modern urban women, with an emphasis on relationships and sexuality, and bodily and intellectual autonomy in a social milieu that has not yet evolved to reflect new values for living. On the other, it is a book deeply interested in the philosophical and literary potential of new science, in fundamental questions of life’s purpose in a newly relativistic universe. Characters quote the Quaker scientist Eddington’s The Nature of the Physical World (1929), a series of lectures that explains key precepts of the new physics and attempts to show how these ideas did not necessarily extinguish the possibility of true religious or ‘mystical’ experience. Also quoted directly is J. W. Dunne’s peculiar An Experiment with Time (1927), which argues for a new philosophy of time based on the notion of multiple, serial selves ranged over a past, present and future all occurring simultaneously. Cusack cites James Jeans’ The Mysterious Universe (1930), a best-selling popularisation of Einstein’s theories for the British market. All are versions of what is termed ‘scientific idealism’: science that elevates the role of human consciousness and does not necessarily negate the possibility of a higher being (Ebury 2014: 14–15). Thus, Cusack chooses texts that offer diverse answers drawn from science, eccentric philosophy and religion, to the question that begins and animates Jungfrau: What is reality and how do women exist in it? In the first epigraph of this chapter, Eddington directs readers’ attention to ‘the problem of all experience’ (2014: 324). In order to confront this problem, Eddington states, one has to ‘disentangle’ the interactions of self and environment. Truth, knowledge, faith, life itself—all of these are a matter of understanding this mutually constitutive relationship. Physics, Eddington argues, can take us part of the way, but we must also understand the unquantifiable, ‘mystical’ components of existence. This chapter argues that Jungfrau is devoted to exploring this ‘problem of all experience’, as modern science and cultural values formulated and attempted to solve it. What makes the novel remarkable is that this exploration is based on female experience, in a community of young, urban women. In this chapter, I argue that Cusack tests the limits of modern theories of existence against the social and physical realities of life for women in modernity, as her characters attempt to find a system of thought capable of navigating the ‘wild tides’ of life and confronting what Thea calls ‘the appalling tangle of living’ (50, 73). Drawing on Sydney’s estuarine qualities, Cusack uses an aqueous register of metaphor to convey the problem of existence as it is dealt with by these women. In contrast with Stead’s deployment of an

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aqueous dialectics of blockage and flow, submersion and elevation, Cusack compares life to a series of tides and waves, that, in the absence of a solid value system, can be overwhelming. Thea relates her inability to centre herself in life to being caught in ‘wild tides, that engulfed her, pouring in and around her’ (50). These tides also signify both Thea’s desire and the danger of it. After sleeping with Professor Glover in a seaside cottage, Thea wades out into the waves: She waded out till the waves washed over her feet in a smother of pale foam. It was so cold that she gasped, but running through the shallows with the spray flying away in the light breeze, the blood soon tingled in her veins, till even the icy water seemed warm. At the south end of the tiny bay the rocks, uncovered by the tide, gleamed dark and shiny in the morning light. The slow waves creamed round them with a faint hissing, stirring the heavy tan seaweed to and fro in an endless swaying rhythm. What could matter now? she cried, flinging out her arms in a wild, ecstatic movement. Nothing could take from her what she had; nothing rob her of the fact that for one night she had been loved, privileged to comfort and soothe the one man who could ever mean just what Owen meant to her. (148)

In this erotically charged scene, Thea absorbs the wildness of the waves as she relishes her moment of sexual intimacy with Owen. Yet, when Glover abandons her and she is faced with pregnancy and social exclusion, the waves become her method of self-destruction. Thea’s friend Marc, self-proclaimed ‘modern woman’, welcomes the potential freedoms of a relative universe, and thus for her the ocean is exhilarating rather than overpowering. Feeling as if all ‘worry’ and ‘irritation’ is ‘swept away’ by the water, Marc relishes the feeling of being ‘caught’ on the ‘curling crest’ of a wave ‘bigger than the others’, and she allows it to carry her ‘swiftly shorewards in a flurry of hissing foam’ (102). Ordered and highly-structured Eve, on the other hand, manages to make unwanted thoughts recede ‘like the wash of wave’, leaving only ‘a solitary islet of irritation’ (98). The narrative frequently features locations such as the beach, harbour and liminal shoreline. Cusack utilises these spaces in their capacity as ‘paradigms of discovery, encounter, transformation’ (Gefter Wondrich 2016: 146), pairing them with the watery properties of dissolution and unknowability inherent in Thea’s engulfing wave.

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These aqueous poetics correspond with Cusack’s interest in exploring the ramifications of a newly-fluid reality and shifting value systems. Jungfrau is somewhat anomalous in the context of this study. It is the shortest novel, with the smallest cast of characters and fewest locations. Despite its excursions to the beach and shoreline, Jungfrau has markedly more scenes set in interior locations, corresponding to the intense focus on subjective experience needed to explore how and from where individuals adopt values for living. Middle-class, gainfully employed characters acknowledge the suffering of those experiencing the worst of the Depression, and the book seems to suggest that any philosophy of living must incorporate a social conscience. Nevertheless, sociopolitical discourse does not have the strong presence it has in the work of Stead, Dark, Tennant and Barnard Eldershaw. The narrative clearly takes place in contemporary Sydney (late 1933 to be exact), but it is positioned within a cosmopolitan framework that makes no attempt to equate the city with the nation, or to engage with ideas of national identity. Likewise, there is no engagement with the history of the city.1 Cusack’s characters do not even have a sense of their own past, beyond the history of their friendships with each other. In this way, Jungfrau fits most easily within a late modernist canon of introspective books about tricky interconnections between women and men in urban space, including Rosamond Lehmann’s Weather in the Streets (1936) and Jean Rhys’s thirties novels of transient, unhoused urban women. As in those works, free indirect discourse focuses attention on the inner lives of its female characters, whose experience of and relationship to various urban spaces play out themes of desire, loneliness and alienation.

Writing ‘the Emerging City Type’ In Sydney’s upmarket quarterly, The Home (1920–1942), the city, the home and the female body functioned as key sites for the transmission of modernism. In cover images by Thea Proctor and Hera Roberts, bold blocks of colour and sharp modern lines place the elongated, ‘flapper’ figure in typically urban scenes or modern domestic 1 Cusack always claimed to have a great interest in Australian history and was taught by the same groundbreaking historian, G. A. Wood, who inspired Barnard and Eldershaw (North 2007). Her next work after Jungfrau was a play based on the life of an Irish convict in 1815 Australia.

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space (Dalziell 2007: 772). For the April 1930 issue, Hera Roberts poses her modern woman at the window of a high-rise apartment. She looks out at the city skyline and the harbour behind it. In the foreground there is a table elegantly set for two. The woman may be a homemaker preparing dinner for her husband, or a modern woman of independent means waiting for the arrival of a lover. On the cover of the July 1930 ‘Interior Decoration Number’, a woman in a well-appointed living room perches on a sofa. The geometrical symmetry of the modern furniture matches the lines of the woman’s evening gown. Bathed in warm lamp light, she reaches towards a small collection of books. The image makes the woman master of her own domain, while also posing her as just another elegant design object in a scene intended to sell magazines. As Edwards and Mimmocchi write, in The Home, women are ‘both the authors and subjects of images valorising the new cultural experiences of the city’ (Edwards and Mimmocchi 2013: 67). Australian literary fiction somewhat lagged behind commercial art and design when it came to narratives about and for the modern urban woman. In a 1960 essay for Westerly, Cusack noted this: ‘There were no models I could study’, she wrote, ‘the few books written about the city belonged to another generation and had little relation to mine’ (32). She wanted to write ‘the emerging city type as fully and authentically as our writers of the ‘Nineties had described the life of our “bush” … and our bushmen’ (1960: 32). In other words, Cusack intended Jungfrau to function as a kind of ‘future’ for Australian literature, one that embraced modern ideas. The novel is self-consciously ‘modern’—the word itself appears almost twenty times in its three hundred pages. Working to establish a field of reference for itself, the narrative is laden with intertextual references, not only to science but also to art, literature and philosophy. These references ensure that the narrative is located in a highly literate, sophisticated world interested in contemporary ideas. An English publisher wanted Cusack to change the location to London, ‘since the theme was international’ (qtd. in Freehill and Cusack 1975: 43). She refused. I would argue she did so because for the novel to function as a new kind of Australian literature, it could only be set in Sydney, as Australia’s largest and most cosmopolitan city. Early reviewers seemed to think Cusack had succeeded in her project to write a new kind of modern Australian novel. When Jungfrau came second to Kylie Tennant’s Tiburon in The Bulletin’s S.H. Prior competition, Frank Dalby Davison, editor of the magazine’s literary Red Page,

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said that Cusack’s novel ‘stands alone, because it is the first Australian novel to take the liberated young woman as its theme’ (qtd. in Freehill and Cusack 1975: 42). On the radio, the secretary of the Fellowship of Australian Writers, Camden Morrisby, claimed that ‘this story of three young women in Sydney brings alive not only a new generation, but a new world’ (qtd. in Freehill and Cusack 1975: 42). In a review titled ‘Future of the Australian Novel’, the Adelaide Advertiser’s critic wrote that the book was ‘a valuable picture of our city life that should do much to dispel persistently recurring illusions abroad concerning Australians’ home, culture, manners and way of speech’ (1937: 11). This review is interesting for its assuredness that the novel is capable of communicating modern Australia to an international audience. Capturing the time’s ambivalent relationship to modernist art, a reviewer in Brisbane’s The Telegraph chided its ‘background of modernism typical of undergraduate thought’, but allowed that the writing showed ‘intensity and an artistic literary ability which in these days, when matter-of-fact journalistically workmanlike Australian books are pouring from the presses, is quite a startling contrast’ (1937: 16). To my mind, Jungfrau’s modernity lies in its ambitious attempt to confront the base problems of living by writing modern science and modern women together. What makes the novel so modern is its combination of earnestness and uncertainty, as it searches for a system of thought best able to serve the lives of young, urban women and confront their chief concerns of work, sexuality, relationships, purpose and individual freedom. This is not an easy task, and it results in what we might call an estuarine dynamic of opacity and changeability. At times, the narrative seems unsure of its own values, and those of the ‘emerging city type’ it wishes to portray. Cusack was a lapsed Christian interested in science and anarchist socialism, and this ideological disposition is evident in the novel’s diverse catalogue of ideas, chief among them scientific idealism. Thea, Eve and Marc serve as conduits through which Cusack can critique these ideas while exploring their literary and aesthetic possibilities. In Thea especially, this means it can be difficult to recognise and accept the sometimes flimsy rationale for her behaviour. The three women seem detached from the rest of society at one moment, and then hastily remind themselves of the poverty and suffering in the city at large. Perhaps because it lacks the social realist credentials of her later work, Cusack distanced herself from her first novel, writing in 1960 that ‘it is not by any standard a good book’ (32).

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Cusack had particular scorn for the title, suffering from what she called ‘affected … out-dated symbolism’ (qtd. in Freehill and Cusack 1975: 41). It is somewhat odd that a novel so determined to reflect Australian modernity should be named for a German mountain, and that a narrative which means to take seriously the diverse experiences of women should be encapsulated by the reductive symbol Thea’s dismissive lover attaches to her: ‘Jungfrau—the virgin, white, proud, untouched’ (162). Cusack attributed the choice of title to the influence upon her of ‘Europeanised culture’ (1960: 33). Yet, it is important that Jungfrau, the mountain, first appears in the narrative as the subject of a photograph, taken by Glover’s wife, the intrepid traveller Alice. In the context of the novel, then, the title also represents artistic production by women; in particular, a creative attempt to capture the likeness and tone of a place. Alice refers to a debate she had with her husband over the picture, who thinks that photographing mountains is a wasted cause, ‘like trying to catch a mammoth in a mousetrap’ (159). Thus, Cusack’s choice of Jungfrau as a title also relates to the difficulties of capturing ‘reality’ in representational art, acknowledging the complexities of the task that her novel aims to complete.

Modern Urban Woman and the Problem of Experience Both contemporary reviewers and future critics recognised that one of the novel’s major achievements is its portrayal of the modern urban woman. Critics have predominately focused on the narrative’s exploration of female sexuality, connected to what Nicole Moore calls the novel’s ‘codification of newness’ (2001: 61).2 Moore brings together issues of cosmopolitanism, modernism, modernity and female subjectivity in her essay on the novel’s abortion narrative as a ‘telling experience of 2 Drusilla Modjeska names it as a ‘prototype for the feminist novel in the interwar period’ (2014: 4). Jungfrau shares many of the concerns of M. Barnard Eldershaw and Eleanor Dark’s early fiction, specifically those of bourgeois women in modernity (2014: 263, 265). Tania Peitzker suggests that generic confusion between realism and romance causes the book’s central conflict, the doomed affair between Thea and Glover. This ‘failed romance’, Peitzker argues, works as a ‘confounding of the binary presupposed by the dominant narrative structures of realism and romance’ (1999: 141). Thus Thea, inscribed by the conventions of neither genre, cannot belong to the social world and must leave it through death.

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a modern, liberated woman’ (61). In this context Moore argues that the women characters function as ‘tropes of the alienated modern in capitalism’, occupying the ‘impossible subject position’ of the modern urban woman (64, 63). They reveal an apparently new subject, caught in a social climate that does not yet accommodate them, as they act out the inadequacy of old European plots and badly failing constructions of impossible choice. (64)

Moore’s formulation of the ‘impossible subject position’ recognises the same quality in the book that motivates my own reading, stressing how content and style both participate in the novel’s exploration of the problem of experience for young urban women. My theorisation of this problem, however, emphasises an aspect of the novel that, to my knowledge, has not been discussed by any reviewers or critics, namely, the book’s fascination with new science. How to live in a relativistic universe is the key concern of the book, and the three major characters epitomise different ways of approaching this problem. All three are defined as types of the ‘new woman’, but each holds a very different world view inspired by a different ideological system, or in Thea’s case, the lack of such a system. Despite her medical profession, Eve believes science can only go so far when it comes to explaining the higher mysteries of life and the universe. For her, these mysteries are explained by religion. Marc, the Lawrence-quoting ‘free agent’, has Eddington, Dunne and Jeans on her bookshelf. She seems happy to sample from them all, having accepted her place in a relative universe. Thea, as we know, is lost in uncertainty, lacking the conscious determination of the other two that allows them to submit to their chosen philosophies of life. Together, the three characters embody both the cost of being without sound ideological or philosophical principles, and the limitations of living in accordance with them. Like Stead in Seven Poor Men of Sydney, Cusack is interested in experimenting with the aesthetic possibilities of modern science.3 However,

3 For extended analysis that confirms the enormous impact of physics upon modernist writers, see Katherine Ebury, Modernism and Cosmology: Absurd Lights, Palgrave Macmillan, 2014. Ebury touches on the work of Eddington, Jeans and Dunne, though no writer she considers seems to have been as willing as Cusack to engage with and quote directly from all three in a single work.

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while Stead celebrates the principles of a rational universe replacing religious faith, Cusack does not relinquish the latter altogether, instead choosing to highlight scientific idealism, which attempts to bridge the gap between the two. Through Thea, Marc and Eve, she also queries the practical efficacy of theoretical precepts, illustrating the limitations of augmenting reality for women. Thea’s pregnancy represents the unavoidable fact of physical existence, lived out in a social world. Accordingly, it tests the practical application of new theories of experience to the material realities of female, embodied existence. The book asks whether any system of thought is capable of accounting adequately for the breadth and depth of the modern urban woman’s life experiences. In this regard, it is interesting that later in life, Cusack attributed the novel’s thematic and stylistic preoccupations with the nature of reality not to science or philosophy, but her experience with illness at the time (she suffered from advanced pernicious anaemia for most of her life). ‘I was in a physical state that gave everything a reality so intense’, she said, ‘that it went over into unreality due neither to psychological nor philosophical reasons’ (qtd. in Freehill and Cusack 1975: 40). While I would argue there is little doubt Cusack was inspired by philosophy and science, the statement is interesting because it frames the narrative not as an intellectual experiment but as a response to the embodied trauma of physical illness. Thea’s two closest friends are polar opposites, and both attempt to guide her according to their own philosophy of life. Marc, so nicknamed for Augustus John’s painting of the heiress and muse, the Marchesa Luisa Casati, seems the most ‘successful’ ‘modern woman’ of the three. She lives ‘by her own standards and her own values’ (205). Accepting the difficulty of finding meaning in ‘shifting, changing, imperfect affairs’, Marc believes one should consider ‘incidents […] complete in themselves’ (74). According to Thea, Marc ‘rejected all the usual motives for conduct: proclaimed herself a free agent, living as she desired, selecting what pleased her’ (74). Marc flippantly references D. H. Lawrence (109), but her personality and behaviour suggests deeper appreciation of Lawrence’s fascination with the literary and social ramifications of relativity. As he wrote in Fantasia of the Unconscious (1922), we are in sad need of a theory of human relativity. We need it much more than the universe does. The stars know how to prowl around each other without much damage done. But … mankind, why, we are always falling foul of one another. (2012: 66)

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‘I also feel, most strongly’, Lawrence continues, ‘that in itself each individual creature is absolute, in its own being. And that all things in the universe are just relative to the individual living creature’ (2012: 209). The same sort of philosophy seems to motivate Marc, who lives in a ‘queer, absorbed world of her own’: she has, according to Thea, ‘a way of keeping people outside, so that they never got in and tore her to pieces’ (63, 205). Despite this, however, as a social worker Marc is still deeply concerned by social problems and committed to the material needs of the community: ‘She would spend days, months doing tests in dreadful slum areas, or at the Children’s Court’ (74). This means she has an anchor to the ‘real world’ that Thea does not. When Thea thinks of social injustice and suffering, she can’t even tell whether the sorrow she feels comes ‘from her pity for those others or her pity for herself’ (7). Eve is Marc’s antithesis: a doctor who subscribes to an increasingly dogmatic Catholicism. Reflecting the difference in their approaches to the world, in contrast to red-headed, ‘theatrical’ Marc, whose ‘every hair … seemed incredibly alive’, Eve is ‘self-contained, fine-cut and faintly hostile’, in a ‘starched coat’ and hair cut ‘in that boyish way’ (41, 160, 188). That which is relative for Marc is absolute for Eve: Here was reality. Tortured bodies, tired minds, birth and death. Nothing vague about this; no escaping from facts; no sheltering behind fancies. (16–17)

For Eve, religion is a ‘rock’ to which she clings in a world whose fluidity others embrace (124). It offers a moral code that is ‘immovable, sane and immeasurably comforting’, and she abhors the relativistic values of the ‘moderns’ (124, 179). Like Eddington, Eve has no trouble reconciling her religious faith with her scientific profession. As useful as it otherwise is, she argues, science is simply unable to account for the ultimate truth of existence. After treating a woman whom she believes has chosen to die rather than face life with eight children and no security, Eve leaves the hospital, looks up at the starry night sky and thinks: It was all very beautiful, very mysterious, and the more you tried to reduce it to scientific formulae the more mysterious it became. All rot, the way people talked about the divorce between religion and science. The further you got in science the more you realised all that you didn’t know. And

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your faith in science got rather a shock when it was brought up against the stubborn immobility of Mrs. O’Brien’s will to die. (21)

Here, religion allows Eve to accept both human desperation and the mystery of the universe, perfectly solving the problem of experience on both material and metaphysical levels. Cusack describes Eve’s patient, Mrs. O’Brien, as ‘worn out with constant childbearing, weakened by bad food, and too little of that, till her poor, overworked body couldn’t bear the strain any longer’ (21). In the book, the experiences of women in modernity seesaw between the two extremes of sensual pleasure and physical suffering. Eve also has little patience for modern philosophy, mocking Nietzsche as unable to comprehend the reality of life for the vast majority of women. After Thea reveals her pregnancy, Eve paraphrases the philosopher: ‘Wasn’t it Nietzsche—or perhaps Schopenhauer’, she says, ‘who talked about woman being an enigma, whose only solution was pregnancy?’ (181).4 Eve scoffs at this idea, suggesting that if Nietzsche were to have her job for a few weeks he would be cured ‘of the idea that it was any solution’ (181). Cusack subtly subverts the philosopher’s authority by having Eve first unsure of whom to credit with the quotation, then highlight the male philosopher’s ignorance of the complex realities of women’s embodied existence. It is Eve, via her priest, who provides Thea with the first of the two aphorisms that become the novel’s dual refrains. ‘If you leave yourself open to the world’, Eve tells her friend, ‘it will rush in on you’ (4). Openness to experience and fluid existence may grant freedom, but a lack of boundaries can also be dangerous. Eve’s response to such a proposition is to cling tighter to her religion and her work. Marc, hearing the same phrase, feels ‘filled with a sense of power’: ‘It was only by testing life to its fullest and bitterest that you get down to the essential core of things’ (225). We are reminded of Marc gleefully riding the wave that Thea fears will engulf her. Accordingly, in Thea, Eve’s aphorism causes overwhelming disorientation: Thea had a sudden terrifying sense of the walls, the building beyond, the whole great whirling space of sky with its starry load sweeping down, 4 Eve seems to be referring to Thus Spoke Zarathustra: ‘Everything about woman is a riddle, and woman has but one solution: pregnancy’ (2006: 48).

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engulfing her, and she sat up, lighted a cigarette and inhaled its fragrance. There was a sense of security in its smooth tip; of warmth, familiarity, sweeping her back from cosmic chaos briefly, terrifyingly visualised. It linked you up with the known, ordinary things. “It will rush in on you.” The dark, swirling currents that pulsated outside you; the wild, mad stirrings that made you ache at the glimpse of a star hanging over the dark roofs. The unplumbed, secret deeps in your mind, that made you recoil from yourself … All these rushing in, sweeping you away, engulfing you because there were no longer barriers, no longer walls, nothing between you and reality. (4–5)

The passage evokes the opening to James Jeans’s The Mysterious Universe: Standing on our microscopic fragment of a grain of sand, we attempt to discover the nature and purpose of the universe which surrounds our home in space and time… We find the universe terrifying because of its vast meaningless distances, terrifying because of its inconceivably long vistas of time which dwarf human history to the twinkling of an eye, terrifying because of our extreme loneliness and because of the material insignificance of our home in space – a millionth part of a grain of sand out of all the sea-sand in the world. (1934: 3)

Thea feels overwhelmed by the rushing tides of the whole, unfathomable universe. Quantum physics of the sort she reads from Marc’s bookshelf, coupled with slowly increasing social liberalism, has swept away the accepted principles of life. For Thea, nothing else has replaced them. There is nothing between her and ‘reality’, and she does not know what reality is anymore. As a result, her sense of herself in the world has been completely destabilised. Thea even seems startled by the fact of her own mental complexity, the extent of which was no doubt revealed by the psychology classes she took as part of her teaching degree. She may claim, as she does later in the narrative, that there can be ‘no pigeonholing people; or yourself, for that matter. No docketing yourself as “Dorothea Mackinley, Class II, Section 8, snub-nosed brunette”’ (74). Yet, if she accepts this to be so, then she must also confront the ‘unplumbed, secret deeps’ of her own mind. Thus she finds affinity with the words that become the novel’s second intonation, a line by Christopher Brennan, ‘I am shut out of mine own heart’ (qtd. 51, 56, 195, 233, 265). Leaving yourself open to the world only to have it rush in on you; facing an existential crisis so deep

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as to feel shut out of your own heart: this speaks to Moore’s notion of the modern woman’s ‘impossible subject position’ (2001: 63). It also emphasises that without a solid system of thought to guide her, Thea has no hope of disentangling that most crucial problem of experience, the relation of self to the environment. Marc and Eve have carved out space for themselves in the world through a particular philosophical or ideological outlook, coupled with a commitment to their community. Thea has no such anchors. She feels she is a ‘misfit’ in her chosen profession as a teacher (75). Readers see Eve and Marc at work and understand how it gives them purpose, but Thea never seems to do anything other than ponder the nature of existence and think of Glover. She wishes she had Marc’s detachment; she is faintly envious of Eve’s lack of ‘emotional upheavals’ and ‘spiritual convulsions’, contrasting her ‘own haphazard existence’ with Eve’s ‘full, regulated life’ (50, 71). Thea longs for certainty, for some way of locating herself in the real world. She nostalgically remembers a time when, life was simpler, the earth more intimate. When the same stars that would gleam palely in the darkening sky were not worlds beyond worlds in unimaginable universes, but lamps tangled in the pine-tops, resting against the sky. Could anything compensate for the loss of that curious mystic certainty, that intimacy with the stars, that friendship with the earth? Would the subtleties of philosophies, the probings of psycho-analysists help any more than the dogmatism of creeds? Would the secret lie perhaps beyond all these—somewhere in realms only dimly realised, vaguely explored? (72)

Thea’s angst has its origins in scalar confusion brought about by her awareness of the relativistic universe and its challenge to key principles and values of life. Familiar lamps have become ‘worlds beyond worlds in unimaginable universes’. Lost in that enormous, unquantifiable space, Thea feels without clear connection to life. She asks a series of questions and considers possible solutions, concluding with the terrifying possibility that the real answer may be found in some system of thought as yet unknown. Thea’s affair with Glover can be read as an attempt to locate this real answer: he is older, apparently learned, and listening to him talk Thea feels ‘all the richness of human experience [washing] round her in a great sea, till she felt like a shell stirred in the depths of a wave’ (13). This is one of the few moments in the novel when Thea embraces the wave of experience, rather than feeling engulfed by it. The affair does lead to a

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new understanding of herself and her environment, though certainly not the sort she expects or needs. As Marc says of Thea after discovering the pregnancy: ‘Out of the two-dimensional world with a vengeance’ (228). Yet, Thea has no way of reconciling the multiple dimensions of the modern world. Thus, in the end, she becomes what she fears most, ‘washed up high and dry, like the faded shells one found above high tide’ (49).

Modern Culture, Modern Space While Seven Poor Men of Sydney’s portrayal of its titular city highlights poverty in slums unchanged since the nineteenth century, Cusack works hard to establish Sydney’s modern, cosmopolitan credentials. Hers is a glittering city of art exhibitions, parties and surfing; the harbour that is central to Stead’s novel as a site of oceanic trade and primal energy is in Jungfrau a play-space until Thea’s death scene. Highlighting the city’s traffic in international culture, Cusack’s characters mention attending Alleyne Clarice Zander’s famous exhibition of British contemporary art, staged in Sydney at the Blaxland Galleries of the Farmer and Co. department store from March to April 1933. The exhibition was the first of British modernism in Australia, featuring work by Paul and John Nash, Vanessa Bell, Duncan Brant and others.5 It was here that Marc gained her androgynous nickname, when a male admirer recognised her resemblance to Augustus John’s painting of the Marchesa Casati, which was shown in the exhibition. Marc’s transition from Mary to Marchesa to Marc— a timeline in three names of changing images of femininity—shows the potential of modernist art and ideas to impact on depictions of women and their identities. Apart from a few sojourns to public beaches, the Botanic Gardens, Hyde Park and the University of Sydney, Cusack’s novel primarily takes place in private residences, emphasising the important intersection between the home and modernism in interwar Sydney. The idea of modernism as a ‘total environment’ is exemplified by the 1929 Burdekin House exhibition, staged over three months in a colonial-era mansion on Macquarie Street (Stephen et al. 2006: 2). Artists including Thea Proctor and Hera Roberts in cooperation with architects Henry Pynor and Arthur Sadler designed six rooms in the modern style, showcasing international 5 For an analysis of the exhibition’s significance to Australian culture and cultural exchange between London and Sydney, see Souliman (2017).

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movements in ‘modern dress, modern architecture, modern art, modern hygiene, town planning and constructional engineering’ (Stephen et al. 2006: 2). In Jungfrau, Marc, Thea and Thea’s would-be lover Terry go to a party held in a ‘palatial domicile’ located in one of the wealthy, southern Bays (65). Attended by bohemians and Russian émigrés, Marc remarks drolly that the party is ‘All rather Aldous Huxleyish’ (66). She laments the conspicuous wealth on display: “It makes me sick when I think that a street away people are struggling and battling and growing up warped and stunted on what would not keep that leopard slut—” she pointed to Terry’s exotic partner—“in contraceptives.” (67)

Taking place less than seventy pages into the novel, the party underscores the connection Cusack makes between modern space, design and changing values for women. This correlation is made most obvious when characters spend an eventful weekend at Careel House, a cottage designed in 1931 by Alexander Stewart Jolly in the modern, minimalist style and built from sandstone hewn from the site into cliffs overlooking Whale Beach.6 Organised by Thea’s forty-something neighbour Miss Chatham, the weekend is attended by Thea, Marc and Eve, plus friends and acquaintances, among whom there is a playwright, novelist, polar explorer and a number of single women. Marc drives there, leaving behind the city with its ‘flaring electric signs’, ‘floodlit tower[s]’ and ‘the great steel arch of the Bridge’ (83). The weekend is punctuated by ‘voices and laughter’ discussing art and literature, the ‘glimpse of bare shoulders and the glitter of brilliants’ (85). A dancer named Poppy entertains the guests with a routine set to Debussy’s ‘L’Aprés-midi d’une faune’, widely considered to mark the beginning of modern music (96). The house is implied to be a space of sexual liberation: there is open discussion of ‘pairing off’ and intimate contact is suggested between men and women who have not previously met (79). Cusack’s choice to set this scene in a real

6 See NSW Office of Environment and Heritage, ‘Careel House’.

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house shows how she equates modern space with modern ideas, and her commitment to emphasising Sydney’s verifiable cosmopolitanism.7 Cusack describes precisely the house’s geographic location. Marc looks out at the land from a parapet: Scarred and dark, the low coastline curved north along the open sea and westward to the shores of the Hawkesbury estuary. Intricate wooded hills receded to lose themselves in unsubstantial cloudlike stains against the sky. (100)

Somewhat reminiscent of Stead’s ‘hideous low scarred yellow horny and barren headland’ (1), Cusack locates Careel House in the middle of Sydney as an estuarine environment, with the adjectives ‘scarred and dark’ augmenting the scene’s modernist glitter with a slightly primordial energy. It is not surprising then that during this weekend of apparently carefree fun, Thea first considers watery death as an escape from the problem of experience. Cusack writes: she had swum out into the surf at Whale Beach, abandoning herself to the current, scarcely even fighting, till Terry came after her. How hopeless she had been of finding either meaning or significance for the strange, disordered, patternless thing that made up her life! (149)

The seashore, as Roberta Gefter Wondrich explains, lacks the stability of land, sharing the ocean’s unknowability (2016: 145). Thus, it is often rendered as the locus of the coexistence of opposites, determined by a set of binary oppositions: nature and culture, cosmos and chaos, historical and ancestral time. (145)

The scene at Careel House responds to this play of oppositions, as Cusack uses the location to prove Sydney’s modern, cosmopolitan credentials, while also harnessing its geographic properties to highlight Thea’s will to aqueous destruction. The two are linked, illustrating the tension between competing notions of the modern: as increasing cosmopolitanism and 7 In the 1930s and 40s, Careel House was a scene of high cultural life in Sydney; Cusack herself organised plays to be performed there and wrote part of Jungfrau while in residence (North 2001: 64; Freehill and Cusack 1975: 42).

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freedom, and as a threat to subjectivity brought by an awareness of life as a ‘strange, disordered, patternless thing’ (149). While writing Jungfrau, Cusack was teaching at Sydney Girls High School, and living in a small ‘flatlet’ in a building on Macquarie Street to be closer to her ‘social interests’ (Freehill and Cusack 1975: 38). At the time, she wrote to her friend and future collaborator Florence James: ‘Altogether I am finding life as an independent woman so fascinating that I can’t conceive of wanting to change it for any other’ (James 1989: ix). In the letter, Cusack connects her life as an ‘independent woman’ to the flat and its central position in the city. The same notion inspires the living situation of her three characters, all of whom rent rooms in innercity lodging houses. In these rooms, Marc, Thea and Eve display their personalities, engage with art, music and literature, and most importantly, answer to no one. Yet the chief feature of these spaces is their permeability: neither wholly private and independent nor completely public and communal, they allow Cusack to show the extent to which each of the three characters has reconciled herself with her environment and found a pattern with which to order her life. Eve lives in a building attended by maids in a room she seems to model after the precision and order of the hospital. The room has ‘hard, white light’, resembling the hospital’s ‘white walls glaring in the afternoon sun’ (16, 197). Eve does not like ‘shaded lamps’ in the same way she does not like shades of grey in what to her should always be black and white. Being in the room emphasises Thea’s sense of dislocation: ‘Whenever I come here’, she says to Eve, ‘I get an inferiority complex. … You see, it’s all so—so—organised. I feel like a cog that’s got out of a wheel’ (188). Marc’s room is noted for its central position, in a building close to both the city and the harbour: What matter that the Woolloomooloo trams ran to their terminus a few hundred yards from their garden, or that occasionally ships coaled just off the shore and made the night hideous with their noise. It was more than ample compensation that the windows looked out on the harbour and the air was incessantly filled with the sound of the sea and the crying of gulls. (203)

The location and spatial properties of Marc’s room—permeated both by the waterway and the business of the city—relate to her ability to move between and across different social realms, from bohemian parties to

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slums and the children’s court. It is only Marc, navigating the waves of experience by establishing her ‘own standards for living’, who could have ‘seen the possibilities of the long, narrow attic in the old-fashioned house down on the water’s edge’ (203). Thea seems to exist somewhere between her own, Eve’s and Marc’s rooms. Friends enter and exit Thea’s flat even when she is not there. In one scene, Eve brings Thea flowers and waits for her to return. Thea herself does the same with Marc’s room, and feels completely at home in someone else’s space: ‘Marc’s was the kind of flat where you let yourself in if the owner were away … made yourself a cup of tea and smoked her cigarettes and read her books’ (203). This shows Thea’s lack of solid grounding in the world; she does not possess what Eve calls a ‘sense of proportion’ in the same way her friends do (17). This dislocation extends to her relationship to the wider social milieu. Early in the novel, Thea readies herself for bed and listens to the city around her: She listened to the faint roar of the trams in King Street. Like a jungle, the city with its dark, stolid buildings all cramped together. Hiding what? You could imagine strange, secret vices, turbulent dreams, mad passions. She laughed ruefully. She was always dramatizing things. Probably they hid only frivolling and boredom; at the worst a querulous irritation with life. (6–7)

Thea’s limited understanding of her own environment is revealed here. In the day-to-day city of tram schedules and ‘dark, stolid buildings’, she imagines dramatic secrets and mysterious passions. Eve and Marc don’t have to imagine passion and drama; they experience the city’s shadows every day in their capacities as doctor and social worker. This is why Thea is dubbed by those around her the ‘Della Robbia child’, a toddler in two-and-a-half dimensions, often sheltered in its mother’s arms, unable to turn its head to see properly the distinctive blue background in which it is set (106, 108, 225). This blue milieu is explicitly connected to Thea’s inability to deal with the ‘wild tides’ of existence. Marc first makes the connection between the Della Robbia Child and Thea, ‘[r]eal, and yet static, immobilised against that bright burning blue’, as she sees Thea poised on the rocks at Whale Beach, looking ‘so desolate, so utterly alone, as she stood there gazing into the surging depths’ (108). Again, the ocean is evoked in its capacity as void or unknown, showing the instability of

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Thea’s understanding of reality and her lack of reconciliation with the rifts and fissures of modern life.

Serial Selves Through Thea, we see Cusack’s interest in the aesthetic possibilities of modern ideas collide with her anxiety over their efficacy as models of character and practical solutions. This is clear in one of the novel’s most startling scenes, which begins with Thea’s musings on the city and ends with a moment of terrifying psychic displacement. Inspired, I argue, by J. W. Dunne’s An Experiment with Time (1927), this moment shows how Cusack’s fascination with new science and modernist aesthetics conflict with her commitment to representing social reality as it is experienced by modern urban women. In a scene evocative of that classic text of female displacement, The Yellow Wallpaper, Thea turns towards her bed but is surprised to see that it is already occupied: her heart froze sickeningly when she saw that on the bed there was not one body but two. Side by side they were lying naked, very quiet, and with the moonlight gleaming on them in ghastly pallor. As she turned on her pillow to look at the other body, she knew with a terrifying certainty that it was herself. (7–8)

Are we meant to read this scene as a psychotic episode, a dream, or a hallucinatory vision? I would say it is none of these. Rather, the scene is written in response to Dunne’s theory of ‘serialism’, as a test of its usefulness as solution to the problem of experience. This interpretation is facilitated by the fact that there are three versions of Thea in the scene, not just herself and the double. First, her focalising perspective is separated from the two figures on the bed. Only after seeing the two, separate from herself, does she merge with the self on the bed. That first, watching self, I argue, sees her future self, as it will be months later when she will indeed be visited by a ghostly double. In this proleptic moment, Thea is split into serial selves of the kind theorised by Dunne in his experiments with time. Born in 1875, J. W. Dunne’s foray into pseudo-science and the philosophy of time was inspired by a series of apparently predictive dreams he experienced in the first two decades of the twentieth century. Dunne believed that these dreams were not the work of clairvoyance, but evidence that one’s consciousness was split into a possibly infinite number

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of selves that exist simultaneously on various planes of multidimensional time. What if, he wrote in An Experiment with Time, the universe, was, after all, really stretched out in Time, and […] the lopsided view we had of it—a view with the “future” part unaccountably missing, cut off from the growing “past” part by a travelling “present moment”—was due to a purely mentally imposed barrier which existed only when we were awake? (2016: loc. 753–54)

Dunne was an aeronautical engineer, and it is possible that his serialism was at least in part inspired by mechanical reproduction. In his idea of serial observing selves that are eventually superseded by a ‘superlative general observer’ (loc. 2610), causally understood as God, there seems to be some sense of a search for a lost ‘aura’ of modern experience. Accordingly, Dunne claims serialism provides ‘a satisfactory answer to the “why” of evolution of birth, of pain, of sleep, and of death’ (loc. 2610). His strange book, however, fails convincingly to explain all the workings of this impressive claim. Dunne’s eccentric ideas were largely dismissed by the scientific establishment, but a number of writers, including those as diverse as T. S. Eliot, H. G. Wells and Jorge Luis Borges, were fascinated by their literary potential.8 Particularly beguiling was the notion of an immortal self, sailing calmly on what the Irish writer Flann O’Brien called ‘the great motionless sea’ of time (qtd. in O’Connell 2009: 225). In Jungfrau, Cusack has Marc and Mackins, a polar explorer, discuss and quote from An Experiment with Time. The conversation is worth considering in full: “How did you come by An Experiment with Time?” he asked unexpectedly as he sipped his coffee and without looking up from the book. “Just luck. I picked it up in Swain’s one day, and was so fascinated that I eventually bought a copy.” He began to read aloud, slowly and without expression:

8 Victoria Stewart considers the impact of J. W. Dunne’s theories in British literary

culture in her essay, ‘J. W. Dunne and Literary Culture in the 1930s and 1940s’. She pays particular attention to the work of J. B. Priestley and H. G. Wells, where she argues Dunne’s influence is ‘discernible principally in structural rather than stylistic factors’ (2008: 63). There is relatively little critical work on Dunne, but it seems few if any other female writers made use of his ideas.

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“‘Serialism discloses the existence of a reasonable kind of ‘soul’—an individual soul which has a definite beginning in absolute Time—a soul whose immortality, being in other dimensions of Time, does not clash with the obvious ending of the individual in the physiologist’s Time dimension, and a soul whose existence does not nullify the psychologist’s discovery that brain activity provides the formal foundation of all mundane experience and all associative thinking.’ What do you think of that?” “It seems to me to provide the only really logical argument for human immortality I’ve ever struck. And certainly the only type of immortality that I feel is at all attractive.” “I’m not sure that I find the thought of immortality attractive in any form; but at least Dunne offers us one that has the advantage of not conflicting with either modern physics or modern physiology.” “I’m growing to think that immortality is more probable than mortality,” Marc said slowly. “Not the hell-fire-and-damnation or eternalreward kind of immortality, but a kind of four or even a fifth dimensional thing—the final flowering of an existence where ‘being’ is more important than ‘possessing,’ and of which we catch a few glimpses in this life.” (127–28)

This conversation captures modernist fascination with the possibility of secular transcendence through seriality and repetition. Marc’s interpretation of Dunne’s theory relates to her embrace of social relativism. She claims that serialism may lead to a pure notion of ‘being’ over ‘possessing’. The unspoken noun here could be material possessions, but more likely Marc is expressing her belief that an individual’s values or sense of self should not be influenced by other people and society. ‘“You’ve got to build your own life”, she tells Thea, “Nothing can hurt the real you ultimately”’ (224). This ‘real you’ possibly corresponds with Dunne’s idea of the supreme, collective ‘Observer’, situated outside and away from the complexities of temporal existence. Marc has nothing to fear from a ‘four or even a fifth dimensional universe’, because she has a system of values to guide her. Thea, on the other hand, can only face the appearance of her future self with terror, for it confirms rather than alleviates the sense of dislocation that will ultimately result in her death. This is where we see Cusack’s critique of Dunne emerge. For writers who flirted with Dunne’s theory, it allowed for the (potentially) secular reclamation of life after death, with J. B. Priestley going so far as to suggest that it meant death was ‘not the end but rather the beginning of real life’ (qtd. in Stewart 2008: 74). In

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contrast, Cusack’s narrative performance of serialism depicts the certainty of Thea’s death brought about by the tragic facts of her embodied experience of the social world. The sea of time that for Flann O’Brien was ‘motionless’ is for Thea wild and unpredictable. Thus, Cusack shows what Buci-Glucksmann, drawing on Benjamin, calls the ‘temporal alienation of seriality’ (Buci-Glucksmann 1994: 76). Serial forms are paradigmatic of modernist art and cultural inquiry, but they present a problem of technique for Cusack. As a theory and an aesthetic principle, serialism is attractive, but when transferred to a model of character it becomes pathological. Thea’s experience of serial selves leads to what Benjamin would call a loss of ‘aura’ or authenticity through repetition.9 Thea’s sense of self becomes increasingly diffuse from this point in the narrative, as she is consumed by the relationship with Glover and alienated from her own body by unwanted pregnancy. At the same time, the character loses integrity, as her choices and actions are under-explained. In addition to Dunne’s serialism, Cusack’s other major engagement is with what we might call the ‘mystic physics’ of Arthur Eddington. Through the novel, Thea feels most grounded and connected to life when in close contact with the natural world. When she meets Glover in the Botanic Gardens, Cusack narrates the surroundings as a series of vitalistic forces, exhibiting through language real joy in the possibility of an ecstatic emptying out of the self into nature. ‘Lovely to feel it all through you’, Thea thinks, the yearning ecstasy of each upturned quivering leaf, the changing pattern on the grass, the faint smell of clover-blossoms at the foot of the tree. Reassuring to lean against the mottled trunk and imagine you could hear the sap rushing up and unfurling more and more pale, pointed leaves. Reassuring, too, to feel that the tree itself rejoiced to have cast away all its old self and to have re-created this tossing loveliness under the spring sky. (56)

In the latter half of The Nature of the Physical World, Eddington attempts to find common ground between science and religion by theorising the existence of a universal consciousness that links the human mind to the

9 Benjamin’s most famous statement on seriality is ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’. Repetition, he writes, ‘withers … the aura of the work of art’, substituting ‘a plurality of copies for a unique existence’ (2007: 221).

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growth-instinct governing the natural world. In the book’s final chapter, from which Cusack later quotes, Eddington prompts readers to consider those moments in which we feel an inexplicable oneness with the natural world. He contrasts a key equation of hydrodynamics, the generation of waves by wind, with Rupert Brooke’s sonnet, ‘The Dead’ (1914), specifically those lines which reference waves as ‘waters blown by changing winds to laughter’ (2014: 160). Which of the two, Eddington asks his readers, leads us to ‘feel Nature drawing close to us, uniting to us’ (160)? The latter, he argues, because the scientist cannot easily explain the shared consciousness that exists between humans and Nature and flattens the dynamic relationship between self and environment.10 Eddington is a fine writer of prose and it is easy to see why his ideas may have appealed to Cusack, especially as vitalism had a certain traction in Australia at the time.11 However, as she does with Dunne, Cusack seems to falter before committing fully to his theory. When Thea is deliberating over the pregnancy, her relationship to the natural world is soured. While she can still see its vitalistic energy, she is set apart from it: Never had the sea glowed with so pure a lustre—a perfect unbroken turquoise from the cliffs of Ben Buckler to the sandhills of Cronulla. Never had the great dome of the sky seemed so luminous, so tender, nor the earth quickened into such a riot of blossoming. The long waves curled against the rocks far below, impersonally, as they had done for thousands of years and would go on doing for thousands of years more. The trees, the grass and the flowers burst into new life, but everything was remote—outside her—beyond human feelings and passions. (233)

Furthermore, it is the ‘force of life itself’, ‘the sound of the sea, the blood leaping suddenly in her veins’, that audibly tells Thea to die (234). There are no ‘waters blown by changing winds to laughter’ to mark 10 There is an ecstatic element to Eddington’s prose as he describes the merging of the self with Nature that is not unlike that found in literary celebrations of the immortality of serialism. Consider this passage: ‘If I were to try to put into words the essential truth revealed in the mystic experience, it would be that our minds are not apart from the world; and the feelings that we have of gladness and melancholy and our yet deeper feelings are not of ourselves alone, but are glimpses of reality transcending the narrow limits of our particular consciousness—that the harmony and beauty of the face of Nature is at root one with the gladness that transfigures the face of man’ (2014: 161). 11 The Australian manifestation of vitalism is explored in the next chapter, on Eleanor Dark’s Waterway.

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Thea’s death. Cusack’s description of a nature ‘beyond human feelings and passions’ reads as a direct refutation of Eddington’s ideas. Here again we see Cusack reflecting on a particular theory, making use of it aesthetically, and then challenging it in the light of her determination to reflect the truth of female experience. Thea cannot experience the kind of mystic communion with nature championed by Eddington as an answer to the question of existence, because by becoming pregnant with an unwanted child, she has been betrayed by nature, by her own physical being.

Dislocation, Death and the Absence of Direction The pregnancy is presented as an issue to be dealt with exclusively by the triumvirate of Thea, Eve and Marc. None of the women seem to have families, and Thea does not think of telling Glover. The pregnancy and Thea’s wish to end it test whether Eve’s and Marc’s philosophies of life are capable of dealing with the moral, psychological and social complexities raised by these events. Thea’s first choice is to have Eve perform an abortion. Lacking religious conviction herself, Thea does not realise the distress the request will cause in her friend. After Thea reveals the pregnancy and asks for her help, Eve walks through a storm as she tries to decide what to do: She turned sharply down a side street that brought her to the church where she went to Mass each morning. Once inside, in the dim, half-light, she felt curiously comforted. Here was a reality far from doubts, human passions, human fears. As she knelt there, the water dripping uncomfortably down her wet coat, and the air heavy with the smell of stale incense, she knew with a terrifying certainty what she would do. (201)

At the culmination of her dark night of the soul, Eve decides that she will refuse to perform the abortion. Religion is how she understands reality, and to go against it would threaten the ‘rock’ on which she bases her life, the true North from which she measures her existence. As soon as she enters the space of the church, she feels reality settle into something safe and recognisable—notice the article before the word, suggesting multiple realities. If Eve were to compromise her religious conviction by helping Thea, she would lose access to that reality and be cast adrift herself. Marc considers Thea’s situation while walking through a ‘rapid crosssection’ of the slums between Kings Cross and Crown Street (240). For

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Marc, Thea’s pregnancy is a ‘reckless squandering of human possibilities’, limiting her to an existence defined by one event and its unexpected, unwanted results (240). While Eve walks ‘sharply’ to church, knowing the comfort and certainty it will bring, Marc lingers on her walk, reflecting her more relativistic value system. She notices ‘groups of shiftless, slack men and boys’, ‘blowsy women with tired, prematurely aged faces’ and ‘dirty children’ (241). Like Thea, these people all occupy precarious positions, having ‘neither security nor hope’ and thus ‘cut off from … the rhythm of life’ (241, emphasis in original). Cusack has Marc express here one of the major conflicts animating the book, as she considers the ‘philosophical detachment’ with which she normally approaches life: When your stomach was empty and your house smelt of unwashed clothes and stale dinners and you didn’t know where your next week’s rent was coming from, you didn’t rate philosophical detachment very highly. (241)

Marc is aware that metaphysical thinking has limitations when it comes to offering real guidance in the social world. This is evident again when she catches a glimpse of a passage from The Nature of the Physical World, open at her feet, as she comforts a crying Thea: “Looking at the very beginning, the initial fact is the feeling of purpose in ourselves which urges us to embark on the experience—we are meant to fulfil something by our lives.” [Eddington 2014: 324] Were we? she wondered. Queer, how in spite of the cynicism one heard that feeling persisted. What would her life fulfil? Or Thea’s? Or were they, after all, merely blind puppets in a blind scheme? No, she said to herself, no! You must get somewhere eventually—even if you never realised it in your own narrow life. There was meaning—she sighed—but it was damned hard to find. (221)

Marc supports Thea’s plan to have an abortion, convinced that she will be able to overcome the experience, win back control of her future and eventually find ‘meaning’ in life. Yet, as we know from the book’s early, proleptic scene, Thea’s future is bound up with her death. Sure enough, as soon as Thea decides to die, the ghostly other reappears. This time, of course, there is no third observer: Thea now occupies the future self she glimpsed so many months ago. While the other Thea goes through ‘the fantastic unreal routine of sleeping and bathing and eating’, Thea is ‘safe in a crystal world’, ‘a free, shining world’ of ‘windless spaces’ (258). She

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moves now in ‘splendid isolation’, a phrase drawn directly from Jeans’ The Mysterious Universe: The vast multitude of stars are wandering about in space. A few form groups which journey in company, but the majority are solitary travellers. And they travel through a universe so spacious that it is an event of almost unimaginable rarity for a star to come anywhere near to another star. For the most part each voyages in splendid isolation, like a ship on an empty ocean. (1934: 1)

Why does Cusack invoke this text, here at Thea’s death? Of Eddington, Dunne and Jeans, the latter is the most willing to admit uncertainty. His book ends thus: We cannot claim to have discerned more than a very faint glimmer of light at best; perhaps it was wholly illusory, for certainly we had to strain our eyes very hard to see anything at all. So that our main contention can hardly be that the science of to-day has a pronouncement to make, perhaps it ought rather to be that science should leave off making pronouncements: the river of knowledge has too often turned back on itself. (1934: 138)

Given her novel’s estuarine dynamics, Cusack would no doubt agree that the so-called river of knowledge is too opaque and tempestuous for a single theory to explain. Were Thea to read this passage (she throws aside a copy of The Mysterious Universe while waiting for Marc to return home), she would no doubt face the same existential terror that plagued her when considering the nature of reality at the start of the book. Thea never manages properly to answer that opening query, and she cannot continue to exist in something she does not comprehend. Thea dies because her uncertainty—she attends an abortionist’s clinic, but flees— leaves her without a way of confronting the situation she is in. She dies because in the end, there is no system of thought, no ideological or philosophical position, that can account for the complexities of living as a modern urban woman. There is nothing heroic about Thea’s death. She does not walk into the sea like Kate Chopin’s Edna Pontellier in The Awakening. When Michael leaps from the Gap in Seven Poor Men of Sydney, Stead grants him a final moment of flight before the fall. In contrast, Thea steals Marc’s boat and rows out into the harbour during an evening storm, all the time fighting instinctively against the drowning she has orchestrated. We are reminded

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of The Mysterious Universe, with its metaphor of stars like ships ‘in an empty ocean’. For Marc, the boat brought freedom and joy, because she embraced the ‘splendid isolation’ of living with relative values, while also, through her work, maintaining a guiding purpose of the sort Eddington says is necessary. Thea has no such grounding, no purpose; this is underlined when the boat becomes her weapon of death. Cusack emphasises this by invoking Homer’s ‘wine-dark sea’, whose mythical force Odysseus’ cunning successfully overcame (271). In contrast, Thea chants the phrase as ‘a wave caught the boat and broke over her’, the moment she loses control and death becomes inevitable (271). Thea’s last appearance in the narrative is as a body in the ‘dark, cold little room’ of the morgue (277). We remember Dunne’s idea of the glorious immortality of the serial self, which lead Jorge Luis Borges to speculate that in death, ‘We shall recover all the moments of our lives and combine them as we please’ (qtd. in O’Connell 2009: 225). Thea’s death cannot be interpreted in this way. There is no ecstatic transcendence here, no hint that Thea has ascended to some other higher plane of existence. Instead, she is a corpse, the prime abject, identified and tagged by name and nothing else. This is Cusack’s formulation of the serial self: it leads first to a depletion of subjectivity, and then to its complete erasure. After Thea’s suicide, Eve and Marc also face a kind of death. Eve’s face appears ‘like a death-mask—more like death than Thea’s had been’ (276). Yet, when Marc asks her if she regrets her decision not to perform the abortion, she says no, even after finally acknowledging the reality that Thea’s death could not have been an accident. This is an impossible burden to bear, as impossible as Thea’s position earlier in the novel. Marc, who believed that Thea would handle the situation as she would, with ‘philosophical detachment’, laments that ‘the trouble with me is that I’m too much of a damned theorist’ (276). ‘Between us’, she says to Eve, ‘we ought to have been able to save her—if you can save people from themselves’ (283, emphasis in original). Here at the end of the book, Cusack hints at the philosophy of life she may think capable of solving the problem of experience and reconciling self to environment. Before writing Jungfrau, Cusack read Mutual Aid (1902), by Russian anarchist Peter Kropotkin (Freehill and Cusack 1975: 35). It remained one of her favourite books all her life (Freehill and Cusack 1975: 35). Kropotkin argues against social Darwinism, stressing the importance of cooperation and reciprocity in both the animal and human worlds. Marc’s last words, indeed, the last direct speech in the

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book, may suggest that Eve’s and Marc’s greatest failure was their unwillingness to work together to support their friend. Perhaps somewhere, between Eve’s dogmatic Catholicism, Marc’s relativistic values, and both of their acute understandings of social reality, they may have found a philosophy capable of saving Thea. Thus, Jungfrau shares some of the emphasis future novels by Dark and Tennant will place on community and cooperation as methods for living in urban modernity. As a post-script to my discussion of her death, I want to consider for a moment Thea in relation to another restless Sydney woman, Teresa Hawkins in Christina Stead’s For Love Alone (1944). In some ways, the two books are similar, but their differences are particularly illuminating and worth considering in the context of my broader study of Sydney fiction. Stead’s Teresa, a romantic, misfit teacher, feels she will only fulfil her true purpose in life and experience the love she knows she deserves if she leaves Sydney and undertakes what Fiona Morrison calls the ‘colonial voyage in’ to London (2009: 155). Morrison argues that Teresa’s freedom is bought by her willingness to ‘adopt the available maps—masculine and heroic voyage narratives’, and undergo ‘the masculine quest’ as a rite of passage (2009: 160). Teresa’s masochistic, single-minded pursuit of this quest is another philosophy of life unavailable to Thea, whose inability to locate herself in her environment also prevents her from realising there are other environments to which she may have access. What makes Thea different to Teresa? I would say that the kind of book Christina Stead can write and publish in 1944, as an expatriate who spent time in London and among the Parisian avant-garde, is not available to Dymphna Cusack in 1936, living in Sydney, working as a teacher and sending money home to support her struggling family (Freehill and Cusack 1975: 38). For all the city’s apparent cosmopolitanism, Cusack cannot imagine a version of the narrative where Thea does not have to die. It is also interesting that both Eve and Marc suggest the necessity of Thea’s leaving Sydney to deal with the pregnancy. Eve offers to travel with Thea to Western Australia, so she can have the baby and give it up for adoption in a place where nobody knows her. Marc prescribes a seatrip after the abortion, to deal with its physical and mental consequences. Thea never even considers either option. Why? I would say that to have her protagonist leave Sydney and complete the narrative elsewhere would contravene Cusack’s aim to write a ‘new’ story of Australian city life. Thea

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dies instead of fleeing, but the death confirms Sydney as a location in which such a modernist plot can take place.

Meta-Analysing the Modern How might we summarise the contribution Jungfrau makes to the portrait of urban modernity sketched out by interwar novels of Sydney? The unanimous decision of contemporary reviewers to anoint Jungfrau the first novel of ‘real’ modern Sydney is telling in its assumption of what that reality entailed. Whereas the reviewer for The Sun chided Seven Poor Men of Sydney for ‘description’ which belonged ‘to a day that is gone’ (1934: 11), respected critic Stuart Howard claimed that Jungfrau may ‘shock’ with its depiction of ‘contemporary city life’, under which he obviously subsumed premarital sex, religious doubt and abortion, those aspects of the plot that would have been actually shocking to some of its earliest readers (1936: 14). Considering the two reviews alongside the novels reveals how the reading public understood modern Sydney and thought it should be written. Cusack wanted to write a novel of ‘city life’, but Jungfrau is much more thoughtful in its understanding of what the modern urban novel could entail than its first reviewers recognised. The book functions as an extended meta-analysis of modern literature, culture and aesthetics. It is for this reason that the novel’s concluding paragraphs are taken up, somewhat jarringly, by Glover’s musings on the merits of various poetic forms and styles. Glover is the villain of the story not only due to his poor treatment of Thea, but also because his reactionary views go against the core aesthetic and ideological principles of the book. Glover’s critical perspective is idiosyncratic. He is no admirer of modernism, which ‘without hope and incapable of despair’ has made poetry into ‘a cold vestal to be pressed into the service of philosophy’ (284). Neither does he find anything to appreciate about Romanticism and/or romance: poetry should also not be ‘some lovely slattern, dripping a loose uncoordinated emotionalism’ (284). As his choice of metaphor suggests, Glover’s rigid, reactionary ideas about form and content extend to rigid, reactionary ideas about women. ‘It is the poetry of sentiment’, reads the clearest statement of his own aesthetic preference, ‘that gives most complete expression to life’ (284). Readers are expected to recognise the vacuity of this under-theorised view, knowing that Thea is dead in large part due to his unfeeling treatment of her.

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Cusack’s book as a whole is positioned in combative dialogue with Glover’s critical viewpoint. It is both romantic and modernist, a femalecentric narrative whose characters’ affairs in love and friendship are intertwined with modern science, philosophy and culture. Cusack’s literary and cultural allegiances as a writer are made clear throughout the book. One of these is Christopher Brennan, the ‘scholar-poet’, whose Poems (1913) Thea quotes multiple times (57). Brennan is an ideal choice, allowing Cusack to claim Australian cosmopolitanism and intellectualism by association. Brennan was at the centre of academic life in Sydney during the first decades of the twentieth century until he was ignominiously fired after the University learned of an affair he had while separated from his wife. Judith Wright—rightly or wrongly—later asserted that Brennan made the only Australian contribution to the ‘long philosophico-poetic argument of the West’ (qtd. in Barnes 2005: 1). Another explanation for Glover’s flatness as a character is that he was written as Brennan’s antithesis: a man who enjoys a secure position at the University despite possessing no great intellectual ability and no personal integrity. To underline how conscious Cusack is of her book’s circulation within an emerging Australian modern culture, consider the short poem Thea reads in a 1933 edition of Manuscripts, an Australian journal of art, literary criticism and poetry published out of a Melbourne bookshop by H. Tatlock Miller.12 The poem Thea reads is called ‘Epitaph for One who Died Young’ and though this fact is not stated in the narrative, it was written by Dymphna Cusack (North 2014: 48; in Manuscripts 1933: 64). Thus, Cusack establishes her authority as a writer in and of the text, in contradistinction to the authority held by the middle-aged, unimaginative Professor Glover. Jungfrau reflects the enormous capacity of modern novel to explore complex ideas and confront essential issues of being in the world. The somewhat melodramatic story of a naïve young woman spurned by an ill-advised love affair is a framework onto which is built real engagement with contemporary theories of being and existence proffered by various strands of philosophical, ideological and scientific thought. In a quieter way, Jungfrau is just as ambitious as Seven Poor Men of Sydney. It attempts to underpin a middlebrow plot with complex theory, and 12 See the Austlit database for further details. ‘Manuscripts: Periodical’, AustLit, 1 October 2013, https://www.austlit.edu.au/austlit/page/C277773.

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offers an extended analysis of modernist literature and culture at a time when such ideas held little sway in Australia. Most compellingly, it takes for granted that the modern urban novel can be about both the social relations of young women and the fundamental principles of quantum physics.

Work Cited “A Writer of Promise.” The Telegraph, 1937, 20 February, 16. Barnes, Katherine. Higher Self in Christopher Brennan’s Poems: Esotericism, Romanticism, Symbolism. Leidon: Brill Academic Publishers, 2005. Benjamin, Walter. Illuminations. Translated by Harry Zohn. New York: Schocken Books, 2007. Buci-Glucksmann, Christine. Baroque Reason: The Aesthetics of Modernity. Translated by Patrick Camiller. London: Sage, 1994. Cusack, Dymphna. “Epitaph for One Who Died Young.” Manuscripts, no. 3 (1933): 64. ———. “How I Write.” Westerly 3 (1960): 32–35. ———. Jungfrau. Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 2012. Dalziell, Tanya. “Belated Arrivals: Gender, Colonialism and Modernism in Australia.” In Modernism, edited by Astradur Eysteinsson and Vivian Liska, 769–80. Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Company, 2007. Dunne, J. W. An Experiment with Time. Kindle Edition. Auckland: Pickle Partners Publishing, 2016. Ebury, Katherine. Modernism and Cosmology: Absurd Lights. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014. Eddington, Arthur. The Nature of the Physical World: Gifford Lectures of 1927, an Annotated Edition. Edited by H. G. Calloway. Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2014. Edwards, Deborah, and Denise Mimmocchi, eds. Sydney Moderns: Art for a New World. Sydney: Art Gallery of NSW, 2013. Gefter Wondrich, Roberta. “Shores of History, Islands of Ireland: Chronotopes of the Sea in the Contemporary Irish Novel.” In Sea Narratives: Cultural Responses to the Sea, 1600-Present, edited by Charlotte Mathieson, 139–170. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016. Freehill, Norman, and Dymphna Cusack. Dymphna! West Melbourne: Nelson, 1975. “Future of the Australian Novel.” The Advertiser, 1937, 9 January, 11. Howard, Stewart. “Fine Australian Story with a City Background: Tale of Postwar Moderns.” Australian Women’s Weekly, 1936, 28 November, 14. James, Florence. “Introduction.” In Jungfrau, by Dymphna Cusack, v–xv. Ringwood: Penguin Books, 1989. Jeans, James. The Mysterious Universe. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1934.

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Lawrence, D. H. Psychoanalysis and the Unconscious and Fantasia of the Unconscious. Mineola: Dover Publications, 2012. “Manuscripts: Periodical.” AustLit, 2013, accessed 13 April 2018, https://www. austlit.edu.au/austlit/page/C277773. Modjeska, Drusilla. Exiles at Home: Australian Women Writers 1925–1945. Sydney: HarperCollins, 2014. Moore, Nicole. “‘To Be Rid, to Be Rid of It’: Abortion and the Cosmopolitan Modern in Dymphna Cusack’s Jungfrau.” Australian Studies 16, no. 2 (2001): 59–81. Morrison, Fiona. “The Elided Middle: Christina Stead’s For Love Alone and the Colonial ‘Voyage In’.” Southerly 69, no. 2 (2009): 155–74. Nietzsche, Friedrich. Thus Spoke Zarathustra: A Book for All and None. Translated by Adrian Del Caro. Edited by Adrian Del Caro and Robert B. Pippin. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2006. North, Marilla. Yarn Spinners: A Story in Letters. St Lucia: U of Queensland P, 2001. ———. “Cusack, Ellen Dymphna (Nell) (1902–1981).” Australian Dictionary of Biography. (2007). https://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/cusack-ellen-dym phna-nell-12385. ———. “Laying the Foundations of a Writer’s Life: Dymphna Cusack (1902– 81).” Hecate 39, no. 1/2 (2014): 33–63. NSW Office of Environment & Heritage. “Careel House”. NSW Department of Planning, Industry and Environment. https://www.environment.nsw.gov.au/ heritageapp/ViewHeritageItemDetails.aspx?ID=2270160. O’Connell, Mark. “‘How to Handle Eternity’: Infinity and the Theories of J. W. Dunne in the Fiction of Jorge Luis Borges and Flann O’Brien’s The Third Policeman.” Irish Studies Review 17, no. 2 (2009): 223–37. Peitzker, Tania. “The Queen of Australian Soap: Deconstructing Dymphna Cusack.” Southerly 59, no. 2 (1999): 129–55. “Poor Men.” The Newcastle Sun. 1934, 22 November, 11. Souliman, Victoria. “British Modernism from an Australian Point of View: Clarice Zander’s 1933 Exhibition of British Contemporary Art.” Australian and New Zealand Journal of Art 17, no. 1 (2017): 84–96. Stead, Christina. Seven Poor Men of Sydney. Carlton: Melbourne UP, 2015. Stephen, Ann, Andrew McNamara, and Philip Goad. “Introduction.” In Modernism and Australia: Documents on Art, Design and Architecture 1917– 1967 , edited by Ann Stephen, Andrew McNamara and Philip Goad, 1–27. Melbourne: The Miegunyah Press, 2006. Stewart, Victoria. “J. W. Dunne and Literary Culture in the 1930s and 1940s.” Literature & History 17, no. 2 (2008): 62–81.

CHAPTER 4

Ecology, Urban Ethics and the Harbour: Eleanor Dark’s Waterway (1938)

You had the strange movement of the sea under your feet, and the salty breath of it blowing into your lungs; you saw gulls and heard their wild crying; for a few minutes as you passed the Heads there was nothing between you and the edge of the world but blue ocean. Even when you disembarked you were only on a mere shaving of land; the quiet water of the harbour lapped it on one side, and the vast breakers of the ocean assaulted it on the other, and something of their magic blew over the place like a spell … Eleanor Dark, Waterway (1990: 114)

Aqueous conditions must give rise to an aesthetics of changefulness. Ross Gibson, Changescapes (2015: 42)

According to her biographers, Eleanor Dark’s fifth novel, Waterway, has its origins in her consideration of two notions: the word ‘fugue’ and an ‘idea of the Harbour’ (Brooks and Clark 1998: 183). This admission provides compelling framing for the book. Of the two concepts, ‘fugue’ and ‘Harbour’, the latter is easiest to trace in the novel. In Dark’s vision of Sydney, the waterway is ‘vitally a part of the city, […] entangled in one way or another with the lives of its inhabitants’ (1990: 188). It is also vitally part of the novel, informing its structure, plot and stylistic choices. © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 M. Brayshaw, Sydney and Its Waterway in Australian Literary Modernism, Literary Urban Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-64426-0_4

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The novel’s large cast of sixteen characters all live in Watsons Bay, and for many of them, their whole existence is bound up with the water they live so near. The day on which the narrative takes place is ordered by their engagement with the harbour—first, in a morning spent playing by the water’s edge or in it, and then by the ferry trip in and out of the city where their thoughts turn to more pragmatic issues of contemporary life. The middle section of the novel, ‘The City’, is set on the streets of the central business district, but the rest of the narrative plays out on or close to the waterway. This reflects the city’s place in the larger estuary, a fact of which Dark ensures her readers are aware by beginning her book with Oliver Denning, doctor and resident of Watsons Bay, realising that gulls can fly thirteen miles inland and ‘there’s still salt water under them, and the smell of the ocean …’ (11). It is a happy coincidence that Waterway is the middle book in this study’s chronology, for it is the most centred on and derived from tropes of water. Stylistically, Dark’s prose is infused with aqueous rhythms. The book’s five sections respond to diurnal and hydrological cycles, and narrative fluidity is produced by Dark’s free indirect discourse and constant shifts in perspective. This means that the topography of the novel is produced relationally, out of what Drusilla Modjeska calls a ‘porousness of subjectivity and perspective’ (1990: vii). The narrative also fosters porousness between text, space, author and reader through repeated slips into second person. Dark’s handling of time is fluid: though the novel takes place over a single day, memory and history circulate and commingle; past, present and future flow together, informing and augmenting each other. The waterway structures this multi-temporality: in the opening scene, the ‘slowly brightening waterway’ becomes a conduit to the past (11). Oliver imagines himself transported into a time before colonisation: It was this same place that you saw, this pale, flat water between dark headlands; but the headlands were not Blue’s Point and Potts Point, Longnose Point and Slaughter-house Point. They were Warringarea and Yarranabbe, Yeroulbine and Tarrah. (11)

How then do we account for the first of Dark’s two inspirations, the word ‘fugue’? The term has two meanings. The first—a musical composition in which a single melody is taken up and developed by successive parts—can be easily associated with the shape of Dark’s narrative, as many voices give their views on urban modernity and attempt to grapple with

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life in Sydney. The form of the fugue is somewhat reminiscent of what Stefan Helmreich describes as ‘oscillating ocean time’: oceanic temporality is governed by both the long durée of major processes and the more rapid interjections of tides and waves (2015: 107). However, ‘fugue’ also names the psychic state in which one loses grip of one’s identity, often accompanied by disassociation or mental flight from one’s home environment. This is the definition of the word Dark actually employs within the novel. Walking on the beach at Watsons Bay, Ian Harnet is troubled by both personal discord and the looming threat of global conflict. He finds himself escaping into a ‘summer morning fugue’, a ‘flight’ into the past: For it was, in a sense, a flight. He realised that as he walked along the path beside the Bay, thinking with one part of his mind that it must have been a much prettier beach, a prettier Bay altogether, in the days of that Robert Watson after whom it had been named. Now the high-water mark was littered with rubbish—bits of coke, bits of orange-peel, driftwood, seaweed—all the flotsam and jetsam of a great harbour where ships came and went. (33)

Rarely, Harnet thinks, do these flights provide anything more than ‘illusion’ (34). He knows that he cannot escape the troubled present, but the desire persists. In Dark’s novel, there is a sense that all society is experiencing a kind of collective fugue state, wilfully ignoring—through either escapist ‘flights’ like Harnet’s or base arrogance—the intertwined threats of political and ecological violence, social exclusion and class- and genderbased inequalities. In Jungfrau, the ‘appalling tangle of living’ is framed as an interpersonal problem, but two years later, in a novel published in a year of national self-reckoning and on the brink of global warfare, it becomes an issue for the whole community to face (Cusack 2012: 73). ‘How seldom a human being fits perfectly into his environment, comfortable, snugly, like a kernel in a nut!’ exclaims Oliver Denning, the doctor who sees it as his duty to minister to ‘discord of the body, discord of the mind’, and ‘restore harmony’ (151, 13). Humanity’s ability to know itself in relation to the environment has been compromised by the disease of urban modernity, whose ‘parent cells […] fastened upon the land’ as soon as white men drew their boats up to the shores of Port Jackson (11). Dark makes it clear that this disease is social, political and ecological. The ‘urgent discords of human progress’, she writes, have sacrificed ‘the harmony of Nature’, using the capitalised form that encapsulates both

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human and nonhuman in spiritual connection (238). For characters like Oliver and the reflective intellectual Professor Channon, Sydney is ground zero of a nation built upon dispossession, murder and ‘contamination’ (238). In the present day, inequality is propagated by capitalism’s championing of a dogmatic individualism, that in turn allows communal bonds to degrade. ‘Great men have endowed hospitals, founded libraries, played patron to great artists out of their great possessions’, Oliver thinks, but the unarguable fact still confronts you that all these things could have been done even better by a community whose every member lived in comfort and contentment. (72)

Dark reads the social as a fugue state, and aims to lift this delusion by undertaking a critical exploration of Australian urban modernity as a product of colonialism and capitalism, and offering an ethical agenda for the future. For Dark, ‘Sydney’ and ‘waterway’ are synonymous, and she derives aesthetic and ethical meaning from this configuration. In this way, Dark’s novel provides a useful test case for Ross Gibson’s theory of ‘aqueous aesthetics’ (2015: 23). Gibson argues that artistic work in the Southern Hemisphere, figured as an aqueous world of ‘fluid rhythms’, requires and calls forth an aesthetic mode attentive to fluid dynamics (23). At the beginning of his essay Gibson invokes the particularly aqueous conditions of Sydney, and develops from these a description of an ‘aesthetics of changefulness’ that is concerned with ‘formative forces, emergence and adaption’ (42). Aqueous aesthetics can transform a work of art into a ‘changescape’, helping to. intensify our experience and to enhance our understanding of the complex dynamics that are at play when our natural, social, technological and psychological domains commingle and alter each other in this world that is full of mutability. (9)

We might think of Dark’s novel in this way, as a changescape that models and responds to the dynamic relation of natural, social and psychological forms in the technological domain of the modern city. For Gibson, the changescape is an ethical production: in this age of depleting ozone and rising oceans, it is a political imperative that we write, think and produce art that responds to our messy entanglement

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with and necessary allegiance to an aqueous, mutable world. Though Waterway was written before recognition of climate change, Dark’s novel offers clear eco-political analysis of what it sees as the major ethical conundrums of modernity. Set in November 1938, the novel responds directly to the spectacle of the Sesquicentenary, questioning its narrative of beatific progress: ‘Progress’, Denning thinks dismissively, ‘But to what, in Heaven’s name, should we progress if not to happiness?’ (151). Dark champions a modern Australia rebuilt upon values of community and conservation, both of which stress the importance of interconnection between humans and between society and its environment. A waterway figured, for better or worse, ‘vitally a part’ and ‘entangled’ with the city and its residents, is the trope that informs this ethics, which I call ‘vital entanglement’ (188).

The Ethics of Vital Entanglement In simple terms, what I call Dark’s ethics of vital entanglement centres on values of organic community and environmental conservation, underpinned by liberal humanism and vitalist philosophy. This ethical schema is outlined in the novel’s opening scene. Oliver Denning drives on South Head through the dawn, looking out over the red roofs of Watsons Bay, to consider the state of the city and the country one hundred and fifty years after the First Fleet landed. Oliver finds himself wishing to ‘annihilate the city’, a remarkable sentiment in the year that framed Sydney as white Australia’s greatest achievement (11). For Denning, the city is a malignant ‘growth’, and he laments ‘a land … polluted by the crimes and cruelties of one petty generation of an upstart humanity’ (11, 12). Longing to ‘escape’ this ‘unendurable present’, Denning indulges in a moment of ‘wilful mysticism’ that takes him back to a pre-white Australia and into the body of an Aboriginal man. Looking at the scene through these different eyes, Oliver can strip from the landscape its colonial and convict histories: ‘Pinchgut’ the convict prison becomes ‘Fort Denison’ the ‘foolish little fortress’, becomes ‘Mattewaya’, a ‘lovely soaring column of weather-worn rock, holy place of your people …’ (12). Like other educated, progressive liberals of the interwar period, Denning admires the sacred connection between people and land that underpins his idea of Aboriginal ways of being. Brigid Rooney recognises the complexities of this moment in the novel, ‘at once performing settler colonial

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back-projection and unsettling complacencies through an empathetic reimagining’ (2013: 108). As I discuss later in this chapter, Dark recognises the fissure of colonial violence in Australian settler modernity, but cannot incorporate restitution or reparation into her ethical model. Denning’s moment of mystic transference is fleeting, as he returns to the present to reaffirm his own humanist ‘faith in mankind’, strong enough to withstand knowledge of ‘the stupidity and littleness of individual men’ (12). This faith is expressed in a vision of radical, embedded interconnection, as Denning looks out across the water to the city and realises, You were one of the red roofs, and all about you, on this shore and on the opposite shore, from Balgowlah to Parramatta, were your neighbours, the other red roofs … What you see now, spreading itself over the foreshores, reaching back far out of sight, and still back into the very heart of the land, is something in whose ultimate good you must believe or perish. The red roofs and the quiet grey city become intimate and precious—part of a story which you yourself are another part, and whose ending neither you nor they will see. (12–13)

Shared by the reader through the inclusive pronoun, Denning’s vision incorporates the whole of the city as defined by the estuary. Linear temporality dissolves and spatial distinctions are collapsed as the self becomes relational, merging with its environment. An unnameable ‘something’, ageless and originating in the land, runs through the body of a newly animated community. This ‘something’, I argue, is vital entanglement. As an ‘ultimate good’, belief in this connection has the power to transform the diseased city into something ‘intimate and precious’. With my use of the phrase ‘vital entanglement’, I am purposefully invoking vitalist thinking. In recent years, scholars working in the environmental humanities have reclaimed and reconstituted some strains of vitalist philosophy after its unfortunate association with Eugenics and Nazism.1 While I emphasise the book’s eco-ethical agenda, Dark’s thinking must be located within the philosophical context of her own 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).

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time. Vitalism had significant influence on Australian sociopolitical and artistic ideas from the mid- to late nineteenth century.2 Social reformers argued that young, healthy white Australia may yet avoid the social problems besieging its European cousins (Crotty et al. 2000). Dark’s vision for urban modernity based on vital entanglement incorporates elements of both aesthetic and social vitalism. It shares features with the vitalist polity, ‘organic, integrated, and purposeful, with the general good ranking far superior to individual advancement’ (Roe 1984: 10). The novel’s fiery public intellectual, Roger Blair, is generally accepted as modelled upon P. R. Stephensen, whose treatise The Foundations of Culture in Australia (1936) argued that if the ‘Spirit of Life’ and the ‘Spirit of Man’ were to be rekindled after the Great War, ‘it may be possible in our Commonwealth … where the physical basis of life is so strong, and yet so comparatively unwearied and undefeated’ (1986: 93).3 Dark’s maternal aunt was Marion Piddington, who together with her husband Arthur, championed a vitalist eugenics based on a desire to keep the young Australian race healthy, strong and, ostensibly, white.4 ‘Disease’ is Dark’s favoured byword for social and ecological discord, and, as I show later in the chapter, there are moments when Dark’s prose betrays the influence of eugenic thinking.5 Dark’s vitalist aesthetics in Waterway have most confluence with those of D.H. Lawrence and Sydney-based symbolist poet Christopher Brennan (1870–1932), whose work she knew well.6 Elderly, terminally ill Professor 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’,

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Channon has spent the last years of his life writing a book titled The Sapience of Homo Sapiens, arguing that ‘nothing on earth can save mankind but the universal acceptance of a religion’, based on human ‘divinity’ and awareness of the ‘cosmic rhythm’ that governs each life (135, 290). Channon’s ‘divinity’ is reminiscent of Brennan’s notion of the ‘transcendent’, located ‘with all its mystical paradise, in ourselves’ (qtd. in Barnes 2005: 11). Furthermore, Dark’s evoking of a ‘wilful mysticism’ seems analogous with Brennan’s use of the term in his lectures, where it is defined as ‘an inner, personal, informal religion, consisting entirely in a direct relation between the worshipper and worshipped’ (Brennan 1962: 157).7 The worshipped, in this case, is Nature. In language not dissimilar to Oliver’s early morning musings, Brennan wrote that there is, harmony or counterpoint, between the rhythms, the movement of the inner life, the forms of the spirit, and the rhythms and movements of outer things … (1962: 32)

The ethics of vital entanglement epitomised by Oliver’s vision also resonates with D. H. Lawrence’s ‘powerful circuit of vital magnetism’ that originates in the self and connects, through ‘interchange and intercourse’ with any other ‘external object’ (2012: 163). Lawrence’s understanding of the ‘definite vibratory rapport’ (164) between individuals and their environment has discursive and ideological resonance with an early passage from Waterway: Yes, it seemed a very fair slice of time, this barely recordable blink in humanity’s existence! And, crossing your own life, it held many other lives, touching, running parallel for a little while, closely woven, breaking away, so that you could never, at whatever point you chose, study a life solely

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.

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your own, but always a life thrumming and alive with contacts, reacting to them in harmony or discord like the strings of a violin. (13)

Dark’s understanding of entanglement admits that it can be beneficial or detrimental, depending on how people respond to it. At the beginning of the narrative, Oliver remarks that the ‘tangle’ seems ‘at once lovely and horrible’ (17). The narrative works to skew the balance to the former by bringing a communitarian ethics into the space of the city.

Taking the Democracy of the Beach to the City The artist Lois muses that it is impossible to live by water and remain unaffected by it. ‘No matter how soberly you lived on the shores of the harbour’, she thinks, there is a ‘magic’ to the unique way in which such closeness to water orients one’s relationship to the world (113–14). The first two sections of Dark’s novel take place near or in the harbour, as her large cast of characters consider existential life questions in the space that defines their understanding of themselves in their environment. As the word ‘magic’ would imply, the beach in Waterway is an idealised location, a place of both physical and mental freedom that contrasts with the stratified urban milieu. By 1938, the beach was firmly established as a key symbol of the bright young city. In a society still very much divided along lines of gender, race and class, the beach was seen—though not always functioned—as an exception. As Gerald Dillon wrote in 1936, ‘The surf is a glorious democracy in which wealth, rank, Norman blood, or scholarship have no privilege of place. All are freemen of the surf’ (qtd. in Crombie 2004: 177). In Waterway, working-class Jack Saunders remembers a time when he could consider himself equal to his boyhood friend Sim Hegarty, the son of a wealthy, recently knighted businessman: with nothing but a pair of nondescript trunks to cover their golden-brown nakedness, you couldn’t see any difference between Jack Saunders, son of Bert Saunders, fisherman and bottle-oh, and Sim Hegarty, whose father had just been knighted. (58)

Jack and Sim’s shared ‘golden-brown’ (whiteness successfully adapted to the hot Australian sun) skin is proof of their equal citizenship in the ‘glorious democracy’ of the beach. While Sim at eight years old had a ‘great deal of strange, worldly knowledge’, Jack could counter with,

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a knowledge of tides and boats and fishes and bait, of childbirth, of splicing ropes, of how people looked when they were dead, the best way to get oysters off the rocks, of how much beer it would take to make you drunk. (58)

Jack’s knowledge of the sea is blended with understanding of life’s most intimate processes, evidence that he recognises the significance of vital, elemental Nature. In the narrative’s ideological schema, this sort of awareness is much more valuable than Sim’s ‘worldly knowledge’. Throughout the book there is a sense that the characters’ knowledge and experience of the sea has the capacity to be sacred, almost holy, if they are open to it. For the boys Denis and Jonathan Harnet, everyday waterway phenomena such as ‘ocean, and seagulls, and salt wind’ are absorbing ‘miracles’ (39). Together with their friend, the blind child Brenda Sellman, they climb to a high rock known as ‘The Pulpit’, hold hands and jump with joy into the water below. The image recurs when the children perform the same action to save themselves from the ferry crash at the novel’s climax, and serves is a visual representation of Oliver’s ‘faith in mankind’ and the associated ‘harmony of Nature’. Dark’s image of the beach, however, is more nuanced than the version featured in tourist advertising and on postcards. She frequently emphasises settler Australia’s mishandling of the waterway, which in turn suggests that the idealised sociality of the beach is also in danger. Jack recalls how much he hated working on the wharves, where the water ‘was imprisoned and polluted’: Up there in the middle of the city, he thought, you see the ships spewing out their dirty water into it, stewards emptying their buckets of garbage, tourists throwing the bottles of their last carousal out of the portholes… Well—that’s commerce… (144)

In Waterway’s prequel, Sun Across the Sky (1937), the major conflict revolves around rich developer Frederick Gormley’s attempts to evict a North Shore beachside village in order to expand his holiday resort, ‘Thalassa’, There was the beach for his nucleus, and around it he had built Progress. This word, for him, had a capital letter, as Art has for the creator and Science for the investigator. (1946: 7)

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Dark’s sarcasm here indicts a culture that would profit from an idea of seaside paradise built upon its ecological degradation and ignorance of the community that lives in harmony with it. In Waterway, when the narrative moves into the city proper, Dark makes it clear that the democracy of the beach is just that: confined to the beach, and seemingly only fully accessible by children not yet completely imbricated with modern society. As an adult, Jack Saunders is healthy and strong, but unemployment and poverty have caused ‘spiritual distortion’ that is swiftly mutating into rage (336). At the beginning of the novel, Jack breaks his hand, rendering him even more useless in a capitalist system that values him only as manual labour. It is with Jack that the narrative moves into the city, when he boards a ferry only because he has nothing else to occupy him. By showing the city first through Jack’s eyes rather than from the perspective of the ‘rich, the beautiful [and] privileged’ who ‘reign’ over it, Dark casts the modern metropolis as a space of exclusion (181). Each section of the novel is prefaced with an extract from an early account of the colony that responds to the location in which that part of the narrative is set. Thus past and present communicate through various spaces in Sydney, contributing to the narrative’s estuarine handling of time and history. Notably, the first epigraph includes David Collins’ transcript of the Eora people’s spoken protest against the white invader, ‘warra warra’ (go away). This frames the book with an implicit awareness that sovereignty was never ceded, and emphasises the complexities of Dark’s engagement with Sydney’s Aboriginal identity. ‘The City’ section of the narrative is preceded by an extract from Governor Phillip’s missive to Lord Sydney in 1788, announcing his plans for the settlement he meant to name Albion. For Dark, Phillip was a benevolent figure, a man of enlightenment whose best efforts were undermined by others’ greed and small-mindedness. In The Timeless Land (1941), Dark’s immensely popular retelling of settlement, Phillip arrives at Sydney Cove already looking to the future. The savage penal colony of the early years ‘must be seen as temporary—a difficult and unsavoury stage in an upward struggle’ (2013a: 198). ‘One must’, Phillip thinks, plan ahead—and plan boldly, nobly, magnificently, not for a convict settlement, a prison for degraded outcasts, but for a city, the headquarters of a nation of free men. (2013a: 197–98)

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In Waterway, Dark shows that Phillip’s plan for a city of free men has not come to pass. Jack feels the city offers him ‘no place’ (258): in all the activity, the enterprise, the wealth, the industry which the city represented, it was strange that there should be no use for the restless strength which he could feel consuming him. (177)

The narrative frames the waste of Jack’s natural vitality and physical strength as a social failing not dissimilar to the misuse of the country’s natural resources. Dark’s city is confined to the old colonial centre that runs in a ‘long thin rectangle’ from Circular Quay to Hyde Park (Edquist 2010: 249). This space is mired in history: characters pass by the Harbour Authority, Water Police and New South Wales Parliament, and national cultural landmarks such as the Art Gallery and Public Library. These are accompanied by the new sacred sites of capitalism, including Lorna Sellman’s beauty salon and her brother Arthur’s exclusive club on George Street. Yet, none of these places have relevance for a man like Jack, who moves through the streets with no purpose: he ‘loaf[s]’, ‘pausing’ and ‘loitering’, feeling only ‘dull inertia’ and an ‘apathetic weariness and disgust’ (177). This explains Jack’s attraction to the ‘excitement’ and ‘movement’ of a protest march that gathers in the Domain and moves through the city via Macquarie Street (177). The march has ‘unemployment’ as its broad grievance, but Dark is less interested in the specifics of the marchers’ political cause then their capacity to serve as an example of the vital energy of bodies in close proximity. The scenes involving the march emphasise its organic force and effect on the city. The crowd is first apprehended by an outsider as ‘a strange, swelling murmur like wind in pine trees or distant rushing water’ (265). Dark reaches for oceanic imagery as she describes an energy capable of intervening in and potentially even destabilising the urban milieu. Accordingly, when the march begins to move, it interrupts in various ways the usual rhythms of life in the city. This is emphasised in a passage laden with verbs of movement, transition and surprised stasis: People on the steps of the Gallery paused a moment to shrug or grin, people on the footpaths turned to stare, loafers on the warm grass looked up from their siesta and then lay down again with newspapers over their

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faces. Some rose and followed. Urchins drinking at a street fountain waved with hoots of joy, and fell in behind. (252–53)

At one point, the crowd is described ‘swaying’, ‘turbulent and undisciplined’ around the statue of Victoria in Queen’s Square (263). ‘Serenely oblivious to change’, the monarch’s extended sceptre is a silent and useless rebuke against ‘the mass of … humanity’ that denies the authority represented by such monuments (263). Among the crowd, there is a ‘big man with the dust of the demolition job he had just left thick upon his battered hat and half-bared chest’ (265). This is a subtle reference to the large-scale urban revitalisation projects of the interwar period that changed the face of the city without bringing positive change for its most vulnerable residents. This failure in urban planning motivates Kylie Tennant’s Foveaux, the subject of my next chapter. Dark writes that the crowd is ‘infected with the ominous germ of excitement’ (254). Is this ‘germ’ a challenge to the diseased cells of the city that Oliver diagnosed in the novel’s opening pages, or is it a product of them? Perhaps it is both. Dark’s rendering of the protest is not overtly celebratory or condemnatory but pragmatic, suggesting it is inevitable that people forsaken by society will turn to collective and perhaps destructive action against the system that excludes them. Wealthy, upper-class Arthur Sellman complains that the protest succeeds in ‘disturbing the peace, obstructing traffic, inciting […] sedition’ (264). On the other hand, the crowd fills Jack Saunders with ‘obscure excitement’ (253): …for the first time, he saw the established order, which had no place for him, opposed by something in whose latent, undirected power he saw his own bitterness, his own frustration, his own resentment multiplied a thousand times. (258)

Through participation in its collective life, the crowd offers Jack a return to a community he feels has forsaken him. With ‘other men round [him]’, he feels ‘a sense of being one with them’ (177). The march reaches a climax when it collides with guests leaving the wedding of George Hegarty and Veronica Stewart. Many editions of The Home featured photographs of society weddings in which the city’s upper crust flaunted a lifestyle most of its residents could not afford. This is the Hegarty wedding: ‘a show, a kind of elaborate charade’ (183). Lady Hegarty’s young maid Maud remarks excitedly that she plans to attend

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to see the fashions, as if the event is a magazine spread made real. By Dark’s estimation, marriage should be a ‘bedrock’, a ‘symbol’ of the ‘first principles of life’ (269). The society wedding makes a mockery of these vitalist principles. For Arthur’s wife Winifred, who refuses to attend, the wedding is a ‘symbol of the life she hated’, a life of limitation and discord with an abusive husband who uses the marriage rite to justify what Dark codes as rape (105). The wedding’s ‘parade of the Idle Rich’ integrates seamlessly with the city: Long, gleaming, opulent cars with uniformed chauffeurs were gliding into the curb before the church, receiving people no less gleaming and opulent, and moving out again, slowly. (253–54)

The wedding guests’ domination of space is challenged by the crowd of protesters when the two groups collide in a moment of organic confusion that devolves into something resembling a riot. ‘Engulfed’ by the ‘mob’, the wedding guests recognise the broader significance of what is happening (254). Earlier, ensconced in her upper floor beauty salon, Lorna could remark that, to look down from a high window upon some vulgar turmoil in the street was not only a physical but a comfortably symbolic action. (181)

When the two crowds merge, however, Lorna is in a car on the street and thus on the same level as the mass. Accordingly, she feels ‘for one second a spasm of something which was almost fear’ (219). Lorna recognises that with its vital, chaotic energy, the march has the ability to challenge the physical boundaries and social hierarchies that support urban modernity and her way of life.

Negotiating Settler Modernity in Macquarie Place Sydney’s sociopolitical topography is challenged by the novel’s engagement with history, a force that Dark makes active in the modern city. In Sydney’s built environment, Macquarie Place best represents this palimpsestic quality. This tiny town square is overfull with monuments that celebrate the city’s colonial history and early industry. In interwar

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Sydney fiction, it is used to stage reflexive analysis of the city, the nation and their intertwined destinies. In Seven Poor Men of Sydney, Baruch and Joseph meet in the square to talk algebra and fantastical urban futures. In Waterway, Professor Channon passes by Macquarie Place on his way to the Art Gallery as the protest forms nearby. The narrative sidesteps the square’s colonial capital, instead leveraging the symbolic capacity of one of its imposing Moreton Bay Figs. The tree becomes a conduit to alternate histories and ways of being that linger, quite literally, just below the city’s surface. In No Barrier (1953), the concluding volume of her historical trilogy, Dark re-imagines the foundation of Macquarie Place. Dark’s Lachlan Macquarie is young and vigorous, and arrives in the fledgling colony determined to set it to rights after a prolonged period of instability and division. ‘He must’, Dark writes of the new governor, ‘stabilise a present which would become common ground’ (2013b: 92). Macquarie Place will be ‘the heart of his town, the spot from which he would measure all the streets and roads in the colony’: His vision pictured them spreading fanwise over hundreds of miles, tying the whole land together, converging upon this point, the hub of colonial civilisation, Macquarie Place … (2013b: 96–97)

Here, Dark has Macquarie partake in a fantasy of socio-spatial control, which flattens the land with a hierarchical system represented by a network of streets and roads. In Waterway, Channon offers a markedly different vision, one that stresses vital entanglement rather than panoptic control. His closeness to death means he notices ‘tiny facets’ he never has before, ‘details trivial but rich with the freshness of discovery’ (237). Accordingly, while looking at Macquarie Place, Channon observes, … the obvious ill-health of the Moreton Bay fig across the road in the tiny park which enshrined the Obelisk, and the comical little anchor of the Sirius. Was it not getting enough nourishment, he wondered, or did it hate the hot crust of city pavement which tried, not always successfully, to hold underground roots which loved to coil partially about the surface. (237)

In Channon’s vision, official public history is left unstated; the town square is just a ‘tiny park’. Also undefined is the function of the Obelisk,

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which when Macquarie erected it in 1810, quantified space by marking out distances to various locations throughout New South Wales. The anchor of the Sirius, supply ship of the First Fleet and thus representative of colonialism and the convict system, is undermined as ‘comically little’. The focus here is instead on the nonhuman element, the Moreton Bay Fig. An evergreen tree native to the Eastern coast of Australia, the Moreton Bay Fig is ubiquitous in Sydney. This is largely due to Joseph Maiden, director of the Royal Botanic Gardens at the turn of the twentieth century. Maiden believed the planting of trees would have a ‘civilising influence’ on the city’s residents, and he chose the Moreton Bag Fig among a number of other species to serve as a street tree (Frawley 2009: 304). Ficus Macrophylla, however, did not always conform to the pattern in which it was placed. Moreton Bays are known for their distinctive buttress roots, that ensure the tree’s survival in nutrient-poor soil by twining with those of other nearby trees to provide support for the whole. This means it will disturb any soil or cement in which it is planted. In other words, the tree destabilises the surface of the city. A tree’s roots are its life force, and with the Moreton Bay fig, Dark highlights a life force that relies on mutually beneficial interconnection for its generative capacity. This is an example of the association Sue Carson identifies in Dark’s work between ‘land usage and political structure’ (1998: 92): a link can be made between the roots and Oliver’s vision of that vital force with origins in ‘the heart of the land’, of lives ‘closely woven, breaking away … thrumming and alive with contacts’, of vital entanglement in which one ‘must believe or perish’ (13). Furthermore, the tree manages to survive despite the limitations of its environment: the pavement can only try, ‘not always successfully’, to keep its intertwining roots underground. Thus, it resembles the march of people making their grievances known by moving as a mass through the city, blocking streets and stopping traffic. The scene in Macquarie Place unites social, ecological and aesthetic registers as it reappraises the dominant forces of urban modernity. In this way, it can be read as an example of aqueous aesthetics as Gibson defines it. Practising such aesthetics, he writes, We would think about how space and time are being constructed by nature and culture in constant contention, how each represented moment is a myriad different processes articulating with us and with each other, and

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how the observer cannot sensibly be separated from the forces that are making every scene, moment by moment. (2015: 43)

Accordingly, Dark shows how Channon’s relation to the tree goes beyond that of observer and object, and instead brings him into contact with another time and another way of being. For a moment, the professor has access to what Cloke and Jones define as the ecological time of trees, extending beyond human-centric temporal scales (2003: 54). While the Moreton Bay Fig now stands in the ‘naked glare of street lamps’, Channon imagines its ‘ancestors’ knew a darkness lit only by ‘corrobboree’ and ‘camp-fires’ (238). This movement before colonisation works to destabilise the contemporary city with the palimpsest of its past—just as the Moreton Bay Fig disturbs the concrete in which it is set. Furthermore, Channon feels his ‘failing body mystically identify with the failing tree’ (238). Gibson might call this identification aqueous thinking, while D. H. Lawrence would classify it as the product of ‘vibratory rapport’ (2012: 164). Indeed, in Fantasia of the Unconscious Lawrence singles out a favourite ash-tree as a particular source of ‘dynamic vibratory connection’ with his own ‘primary consciousness’ (2012: 163–64). Channon’s primary consciousness is certainly affected by his mystical identification with the tree. In that moment, Dark writes, the whole illness of humanity, the whole insanity of civilised life, the whole long, bloody history of mankind, rushed over him with a force which caused, or was followed by, or was blended with a sudden stab of physical agony. (238)

The indeterminate language here collapses the distinction between physical pain and mental despair, as the tree’s suffering reminds Channon of ‘the whole illness of humanity’. This suggests that the ‘cosmic rhythm’ Channon recognises as the heart of life is communal, incorporating and responding to resonances from the external world. In this scene, Dark’s approach to history and environment in a symbolically loaded space brings eco-political concerns into the city, interrupting and questioning urban modernity as the endpoint of human progress. In their recognition of the failings of the present and search for better alternatives for the future, characters such as Professor Channon and the reflective doctor Oliver Denning embody Dark’s ethical agenda. Their antithesis, and the book’s unmistakable villain, is Arthur Sellman. He is

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an abusive husband, an exploitative capitalist, and subscribes to an authoritarian individualism. Early in the novel, his wife Winifred recounts her failed attempt to involve him in a campaign to protect a patch of trees in the Blue Mountains.8 If there is no financial benefit for himself, Arthur opines, then what would be the point of protecting the trees? As his name suggests, Sellman is a two-dimensional character who serves a singular purpose in the narrative: he represents the worst of settler modernity and industrial capitalism. As a man who believes himself to be free from obligations to other people, Arthur is disgusted to find himself swept up by the crowd after leaving his club on George Street. He loses bodily integrity, as ‘for a few moments the crowd played with him as if he had been a sack of straw’ (265). He finds the ‘confidence’ that he believes to be rightly his by virtue of his wealth at an ‘ebb’ under the onslaught of the ‘tide’ of humanity (263). Dark makes it clear that Arthur is an avatar for his entire class and their inordinate power within society, as he swiftly realises the significance of the event. He feels ‘not only personal danger, but danger to all his jealously guarded world’ (294). This realisation is radically destabilising, a moment in which, …he had been forced to realise that his life was like a city which feels for the first time the ominous, subterranean tremors of an earthquake. (294)

In this simile the crowd fulfils the promise of the Moreton Bay Fig’s roots, struggling up beneath the ‘hot crust of city pavement’ to disturb the ordered city landscape. Indeed, in a telling linguistic link, Arthur claims that his involvement in the riot left the ‘crust of custom and convention stable beneath his feet’ on the brink of crumbling (294). Arthur’s desperate desire to be away from the mob sees him do something he would otherwise never do: catch public transport. Because of this, he is aboard the ten-to-five ferry to Watsons Bay when it collides with an ocean liner, an event that ultimately causes Arthur’s death. Thus, Dark has the crowd, the city space they control, and the waterway work together to exact vengeance for Arthur’s ethical failings.

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).

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The artist’s Responsibility in a Vitalist Polity Eleanor Dark shares a late modernist conviction that the act of writing and reading is always implicated in political contexts and discourses (Miller 1999: 19). The narrative’s representation of the writer and artist’s political responsibilities reflects an understanding of Bergsonian creative evolution: as Roger Blair says, ‘art, literature, music’ are ‘things of the spirit’ that will lead society beyond its limitations, if only it will let them (16). Professor Channon encourages Blair to continue in the cause of culture, writing in a letter, Evolution is a slow and blundering old Ichthyosarurus [sic] with the slime of his primeval mud still thick upon him, but I shouldn’t be surprised if it has always been such people as yourself, in the last six thousand years, who have prodded his tail and kept him moving. (79, italics in original)

Roger and the Professor debate culture and politics, but Dark’s main writer character is a woman, Lesley Channon. As the protest brews nearby, Lesley sits in the Mitchell Library, worrying over her work. Lesley writes short stories and poems set in colonial Sydney, doing so primarily for financial gain with no illusions about their quality. Procrastinating, Lesley daydreams, nostalgically recalling childhood camping holidays spent in ‘a place incredibly fresh, unstaled, hopeful’, sheltering ‘where no other human being had ever sheltered’ (187). Ignoring the fact of sixty thousand years of prior occupation by Aboriginal peoples, Lesley articulates a Romantic idea of an extra-social nature, untouched by the human world. ‘Cheered and subtly reassured’ by her vision, Lesley begins to write (187). Her escape from the realities of the present time and place facilitates her ability to write romantic stories of colonial Sydney that do not engage with the pressing questions facing humanity in contemporary times. Lesley allows herself to become so involved with her flights of fancy that she sometimes feels herself ‘surprised’ that the city about which she writes no long exists (187). In these moments of spatial and temporal dissonance, Lesley turns to the harbour: ‘That had hardly changed’, she thinks; the waterway provides ‘some guarantee of permanence, some impression of an abiding character that nothing could destroy’ (188). For Lesley, these characteristics offer the promise of ‘security and anchorage’ (188). This is a fundamental misunderstanding of the dynamics of water. The waterway’s permanence is not accompanied by stability, and as the

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ferry crash will prove later in the narrative, it is not always safe. Lesley’s short-sightedness in this regard is coupled with her failure to realise that the writer’s task is to engage with the flux and flow of a dynamically changeable world. Thus her misinformed musings on nature are intertwined with meta-analysis of her literary style. Her work has ‘a dim unreality, a decorative air as of formal design’ (187). Her stories are ‘just another example of deft literary architecture, another neatly fitting mosaic of words …’ (187).9 How can they be otherwise, when Lesley has so little appreciation of the true nature of life around her? In this regard, Lesley as writer can be contrasted with Lois as artist, the other creative woman in the novel. Lois thinks of her work as ‘the cracking spark which leapt to life’ between art and the environment (279). The novel features an ekphrastic description of Lois’ painting, ‘The Moonbeam’, as representative of this view. In it, child-size footprints ‘ecstatically’ traverse a stretch of sand, littered with detritus that shines with ‘transcendent splendour’ (145). While Lesley’s ‘neatly fitting mosaic of words’ has an air of ‘dim unreality’, when he sees ‘The Moonbeam’, Professor Channon remarks that ‘the other-worldliness’ of Lois’ work stems from her capacity to offer ‘a new, an entirely fresh and original conception of familiar things’ (245). Interestingly, Dark is at pains to separate Lois’s painting from the modernist work it is hung alongside. ‘They’ve put me among the moderns this year’, Lois sighs, ‘but I’m afraid I’ll look just as funny there as I did among the conservatives last year’ (244–45). Instead, Dark endorses an aesthetically nonspecific practice distinguished by a kind of intuitively ‘authentic’ interpretation of life. In the novel, this sort of intuition offers a valuable alternative to society’s current fugue state. Lesley recognises that artists have a responsibility to confront the uncertainty of their own times, and she is bothered by her work’s lack of contemporary relevance. She has ‘a conviction that the time and energy which she was using so badly could be used well. But how?’ (189). This question will be answered by the narrative that unspools after Lesley goes out into the city and collides with the march. By becoming embedded in the crowd and its chaos, Lesley realises that her life and her work are interconnected with messy but unavoidable ‘communal life’ (121). 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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Lesley is with her would-be fiancé Roger when the two get caught up in the march as it collides with the wedding guests. Described as the ‘stormy petrel of the city’s intellectual life’, ‘dynamic’ and ‘impulsive’ Roger relishes the crowd, which embodies the same characteristics (15). In contrast, Lesley is at first fearful and disgusted at finding herself among the mass of people: the ‘terrible pressure of bodies filled her with panic and fury’ (255). Despite this fear, Lesley is infected by the crowd’s vital energy, feeling ‘a terrible wave of excitement [that] ran round her like an electric current’ (255). This current jolts her perspective of the world. She does not enter the car when her rich lover, Sim, opens his door for her, instead choosing to stay with Roger in the crowd. Dark writes: She was too practical, too logical, to be habitually swayed by emotional symbolism, but she felt a conviction at that moment which nothing in her attempted to deny, that here and now her choice must be made. The easy escape into Sim’s moving car, the blessed physical relaxation into upholstered comfort and security were also, in a cold light of revelation, another kind of escape. Here, as always, Sim had that to offer—the easy way, the good things of life not battled for, not striven or sweated for, but just handed to you for nothing. (256–57)

Lesley’s decision to stay in the crowd prompts an epiphany, worth quoting in full for its articulation of vital entanglement: The heat and turmoil about her, the reek of humanity, the ugliness, the endeavour, the fear and the hope, the brutality and the lusty humour were all translated into parts of another struggle in which whether she liked it or not, she was involved. The escape Sim offered was an illusion, Roger’s arm, solid, hard like the branch of a tree, was a symbol, too; Roger’s eager stare, his uninhibited welcome to life in any one of its beautiful and terrifying forms, was the real escape, the only escape, by endurance and achievement, into peace. (256)

This moment plays out Oliver’s contention from the beginning of the book, that no life is solely one’s own; each individual is intertwined with others, reacting to them in ‘discord or in harmony’. Lesley realises that she cannot forfeit involvement in the realities of the present through narratives of the past that offer no meaningful contribution to contemporary society. ‘Not calmly’, Dark writes, ‘not as a profession of faith, but with the wild rush of an incoming breaker, this knowledge swept

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her’ (256). Dark again employs the motif of the tree, as Roger’s arm, ‘solid, hard like the branch of a tree’, offers a point of interconnection between Lesley and the crowd. Dark adapts the middlebrow love triangle plot, as Lesley decides she will marry Roger the cultural critic, not Sim the wealthy playboy. Together, Lesley and Roger may serve as the kind of intellectual leadership necessary to prod the tail of the ichthyosaurus and move the masses forward in Bergson’s model of creative evolution. In this way at least, the march succeeds in generating a different mode of being in and understanding of urban modernity. Lesley’s dramatic change in perspective is foreshadowed in the library by a visual metaphor that highlights the aesthetic and creative ramifications of her political epiphany. As she ruminates over her work, Lesley draws a ‘complicated maze of black patterns’ down the margin of her page (189). Suddenly overwhelmed by the knowledge that her own problems are ‘alarmingly entangled’ with those of ‘all humanity’, she ‘scribble[s] suddenly all over her careful lines and circles’ (189). The ‘complicated maze’ of ‘careful lines and circles’ is akin to Lesley’s ‘deft literary architecture’; her scribbling is produced by an intuitive desire, at this point still obscured by the fugue, to produce work with aesthetic qualities that extend rather than preclude the ethical agenda of vital entanglement. Reading across the novel, it is possible to connect Lesley’s lines and circles to the rectangle of the city lined by cultural landmarks that the protest march moves through. If this analogy is accepted, then Lesley’s scribbling over the careful pattern is the imagistic equivalent of the crowd’s undisciplined, chaotic movement through the city, and the intersubjective, contrapuntal narrative voice that delivers it to readers. Thus, we see Dark’s understanding of the political import of aesthetic and narrative forms. Through Lesley’s arc Dark emphasises the need to audit and adjust artistic practice in order to reflect the needs of a dynamically changing world.

Crisis and Resolution on the Waterway Waterway’s climactic ferry crash rehearses almost exactly the event’s historical referent. On 3 November 1927, the Greycliffe ferry collided with the Tahiti, a Union Steamship Company liner. The 4:14 pm run was carrying a number of schoolchildren home to Watsons Bay, plus city commuters and dockyard workers picked up from Garden Island (Sheil 2017). The Tahiti was heading to the Heads when it struck the Greycliffe,

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cleaving the boat in two. Forty people died, aged from two to eightyone years old. Many of them came from Watsons Bay. In Waterway, a cross-section of Dark’s microcosmic society ends up on the doomed ferry, including Professor Channon, Arthur Sellman, Jack Saunders and the three children, Jonathan and Denis Harnet and Brenda Sellman. The Tahiti becomes the Neptune, which is the first indication that the event can be read allegorically, with the ferry-as-society confronting the might of the waterway in its capacity as vital force. Throughout the novel Dark brings modernity into direct contact with the past. Ian Harnet imagines destruction raining from the sky into a polluted harbour and distracts himself with visions of a waterway untouched by modernity. Bodies on foot are pushed and manoeuvred by ‘long, gleaming, opulent cars’ (253). Jack Saunders remembers being a boy on the beach, with ‘his knowledge of tides and boats and fishes and bait’, looking up and seeing ‘a plane making its ceremonial entrance through the Heads on the first flight from England!’ (58). Lesley escapes her present-day conundrums by transporting herself back into a time of primeval innocence. These scenes all follow the same analeptic logic as Oliver Denning’s original fugue, when his imagined leap into the past and ‘annihilation’ of the ‘disease’ of modernity inspired his vision of vital entanglement. Before the impact with the ocean liner, the ferry trip seems a similar kind of escape from the demands of the present. As the boat leaves the quay, the schoolboy Bobby Younger stands on the stern and notices the city becoming indistinct: Funny the city looked, receding into that golden light. As if it were not real. Even the bridge looked insubstantial, and Fort Denison, a dark speck, shapeless in the dazzling water. (303)

The ‘dazzling’ water dominates perception, and the city fades to unreality. To Oliver that morning the Bridge seemed ‘ghostly’, but now it is even less visible (11). Fort Denison is nothing but a shapeless speck, recalling Oliver’s early morning reverie, when the Fort became Mattewaya. The ferry trip, then, recreates the dynamics of the fugue. For a moment, as the boat leaves the city’s chaos behind, time is stalled. ‘Here was the familiar salt small of the harbour’, Arthur Sellman thinks. ‘Here was the uninterrupted routine by which his safe world progressed and prospered—unchanged’ (294). This interpretation is supported by Dark’s

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choice of epigraph for the section, an extract from David Collins’s description of the establishment of a fee-paying boat services between Sydney and Parramatta in 1793. ‘This was a great accommodation’, Collins writes, ‘to the description of people whom it was calculated to serve…’ (274). Read in this way, the ferry crash is a collision between the fugue— represented by the slower rhythm of ferry travel and distance from the city—and the discordant present embodied by the impact with the ocean liner. Its result is to reorder Dark’s microcosmic society in line with her ethics of vital entanglement. Early in the novel, Professor Channon remarks that, If all men could be, for a little while in his position, facing certain death—and then suddenly reprieved! Wouldn’t they have learned as he was learning, from the facing of a common enemy, something to bind them together? (119)

The ferry disaster presents this exact situation. It threatens the lives of each passenger equally, regardless of status, wealth and class. It eliminates Arthur Sellman, who personifies a dogged individualism incompatible with Channon’s ideology. When the crash occurs, Arthur faces it with the same sense of personal outrage at the challenge to his ‘guarded world’ as he did the riot: He resisted the elements which were thus assailing his physical safety with the same ferocious panic with which he had resisted less tangible perils earlier in the day, astonished to incredulity that he, Arthur Sellman, should be vulnerable to such brutal assaults upon the security of his mind and body. (314)

Like the riot, the ferry wreck rips from Arthur the safe world that should preclude him from challenges to his ‘mind and body’. Arthur’s last conscious interaction with another human being summarises his lack of ethical engagement with his community, as he uses Professor’s Channon’s body as a springboard to launch his futile escape from the sinking boat. Dark’s conclusion to Arthur’s narrative is didactic: ‘no power on earth but his own cowardice had brought him here’ (314). In the seconds before the impact, Professor Channon has a revelation. ‘Mankind only has one wealth’, he thinks. ‘The earth and its fullness; only one power, the power of his creative spirit’ (304). This knowledge

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appears to Channon suddenly, like ‘a lighthouse beam across the sky’ (304). Dark’s choice of simile is not subtle: acceptance of this philosophy will be society’s reprieve from certain spiritual and perhaps also literal ‘death’. To make this point, several other characters die, including a nameless mother and child, Professor Channon and Lady Hegarty. The last two are uncomfortable contributions to this scene of ‘communal sacrifice’ (Rooney 2013: 108). In using the ferry crash to refigure the community, Dark kills the elderly and the ill and spares the young and fit. Despite his broken hand, Jack Saunders does everything in his power to save Arthur, a man he does not know at all. Dark writes: [Jack’s] creed was not unlike the Professor’s though he had never consciously formed it, and had never learned that it might apply to moral as well as physical strength. But to abandon the man while there was still an ounce of unused energy in his body would have been to him a denial and a betrayal of himself. (323)

Here Dark equates physical strength with strength of character, and it is the combination of both that admits Jack to citizenship in the vitalist polity. All three children survive the wreck, and the scene concludes with them leaping clear of the boat right at the moment of its sinking. Denis reassures the younger two, invoking the rock from which they jumped that morning: ‘It isn’t any higher than the Pulpit!’ (327). This is their harbour, the ‘good, familiar water’ they know so well (327). Suggestive of youthful energy, cooperation and local attachment, the children’s leap of faith expresses hope in a progressive future. If Sydney Harbour is ‘the dark unconscious of colonisation’s ground zero’, Rooney argues, then the ferry wreck as communal sacrifice ‘performs a mythic back-projection, replacing black bodies with white’ (2013: 108). After the crash, Winifred soothes her daughter Brenda to sleep by singing a song about a young Aboriginal girl, ‘Jika-Jika’: ‘Little Jika-Jika, all the darkies like her, / In her dainty Sunday dress and pinny; / Give her water blossom, and a joey possum …’. The song’s use of the crude ‘darkies’ is jarring, especially in the context of the novel’s early willingness to critique colonial dispossession. As she sings and pats her child to sleep, Winifred finds that ‘her thoughts had leapt forward to seek the future, and all of the past that she cared about lay beneath her hand’ (381). The Aboriginal child is consigned to racist nursery rhyme, while a new mode of (white) Australian being is carried into the future by Brenda, the blind

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yet intuitive child who survived disaster through cooperation with others and an instinctive knowledge of the waterway.

Conclusion Waterway concludes twelve hours after it began, with Oliver Denning back at South Head as the sun goes down. Dark’s final paragraphs read thus: Since then the conflict which had begun a century and a half ago had painted [the harbour] with the colours of flame and blood. But in the end, he found himself thinking, the land will win, the land must always win. … It kills them in the bush and the desert, and even here on this water which has looked all day so blue and bright and kindly, it has revealed again, suddenly, the hidden menace of its strength. Its rule is aloof and dispassionate—not an enmity, but a discipline with which to mould and drive people, hurt them, gladden them, terrify or exhilarate them, kill or save them so that they must become, whether they wish it or not, shaped to some pattern which will make them one with it at last. Oliver looked up at the sky. It was ridged with flame which faded as he watched. The long waterway beneath lost itself in a western haze of paling gold, the bridge spanned it like a rainbow, the city skyline sank into a lavender-coloured mist. He turned with a sigh which was the released breath of contentment rather than regret, and looked down at the shadowed sea. A little sailing boat with all her canvas out was racing for the Heads, making for the harbour like a bird homing. (384)

The first of the two paragraphs explains the allegorical intent of the ferry wreck. An ethics of vital entanglement—a ‘pattern’ that will make people ‘one’ with the land—is the only way crisis will be averted. Dark imbues the land with messianic force—it must win—in a way that frames the crash as an act of divine retribution and salvation. That morning, Oliver felt he alone was charged with curing the ‘disease’ of modernity. But now, he lets out a sight of ‘contentment rather than regret’, for his work has been done for him. Oliver gazes out at the waterway, and even though he knows the wreck’s drowned victims float below it, the Bridge is no longer ‘ghostly’ as it was that morning. Now, it spans the horizon ‘like a rainbow’. The future is bright. The ferry wreck is intended to resolve the various complexities Dark has invited into her ambitious novel. It smooths out ethical, economic and

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interpersonal fractures in the community, and restores a healthy humility about humanity’s imbrication with the natural world. In this way, the wreck allegorises the crisis of modernity and its neat solution. Yet the architecture of allegory is never entirely sound. As we know from our discussion in Chapter 1, the allegory’s desperation for wholeness reveals the form’s incapacity to achieve it (Benjamin 2019: 174). Allegory always betrays its limitations somewhere in its language or form, and thus it is structured by tension between resolution and disintegration. ‘Allegories’, writes Benjamin, ‘are in the realm of thought what ruins are in the realm of things’ (188). Does Dark’s ferry wreck reveal the impossibility of her desired resolution? And if so, what are we to make of it? In order to have the ferry wreck succeed as an allegory, Dark has to use coincidence to manoeuvre her characters onto the boat. She also has to invite anachronism into the text: the Greycliffe disaster on which the wreck was based occurred in 1927, before the Bridge significantly reduced the number and frequency of ferry routes available. In 1938, there was no ten-to-five ferry to Watsons Bay. This is a slight error, and it would not bear mentioning except Dark directly points out the anachronism herself, in an author’s note at the beginning of the book: For the purposes of my story, I have revived the regular ferry service (which was discontinued some years ago) from Circular Quay to Watson’s Bay and intermediate wharves. Although some of the events described in Part IV are based on real happenings in November, 1927, all the characters in the book are imaginary. (n.p.)

This note interests me because there is no clear reason for including it. The disclaimer about the fictionality of her characters is understandable, given the Greycliffe loss was only eleven years previous. But why the detail about the ferry service? Did Dark worry that Sydney-based readers might recognise that the ill-fated ferry could not have been where she said it was in 1938? By pointing the inaccuracy out, Dark ironically draws attention to it. In this way, the note highlights the space between the fictional narrative and its historical referent in a way that undermines the integrity of the former. Read closely, even the final hopeful lines of the novel admit slight uncertainty. When Oliver releases his ‘breath of contentment’, why is the sea he looks down on ‘shadowed’? It seems an odd choice of adjective in a passage so full of light and colour. What is hidden below this

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shadowed sea? After the ferry wreck, the little sailing boat racing into the Harbour ‘like a bird homing’ is clearly intended as an image of reconciliation. But the boat is in motion, and we never see its safe arrival. This slight ambivalence in the novel’s resolution correlates with Caroline Levine’s reading of narrative closure, which, she explains, is in fact a beginning (2015: 41). As Levine explains, the resolution of the novel’s various plots and character arcs—typically through a wedding, or in Dark’s case, a ferry wreck—in fact launches ‘a series of political and social relationships’ that readers do not see play out on the page (41). Thus, the novel ends but its conclusion implies a future which is, of course, ‘a deliberately uncontained temporal process’ (41). Likewise, even Dark’s seemingly watertight resolution cannot avoid some leakage. In Waterway, Dark brings together ideological, discursive and aesthetic registers in an attempt to confront and contain ‘the whole insanity of civilised life’ and ‘the whole long, bloody history of mankind’ (238). But what system of thought, what event or form is capable of resolving this crisis of modernity? Only a fictional one. Read as a necessarily imperfect allegory, the ferry wreck is a reminder that narrative form and aesthetic modes afford things reality cannot. If Dark’s book is a changescape, then its conclusion shows the changescape’s limitations. Art—narrative fiction—can only do so much. As Timothy Bewes writes, in postcolonial modernity ‘the ethical (or aesthetic) obligation to write and the aesthetic (or ethical) impossibility of writing are equally irrefutable’ (2010: 43). Perhaps this is why Dark will, in a few years’ time, interrupt her historical trilogy to write and publish a book about writerly anxiety. In The Little Company (1945), a writer in wartime Sydney cannot find the words to confront modernity’s ‘repeated hammer-blows of destructiveness’ (1985: 62). This has manifested, for him and the world at large, in a ‘drying up of honest writing at its source’ (62). In Waterway, the writing still flows—but only just.

Works Cited Barnard Eldershaw, M. Essays in Australian Fiction. Melbourne: Melbourne UP, 1938. Barnes, Katherine. Higher Self in Christopher Brennan’s Poems: Esotericism, Romanticism, Symbolism. Leidon: Brill Academic Publishers, 2005. Bell, Pamela. “Art That Never Was: Representations of the Artist in TwentiethCentury Australian Fiction.” PhD thesis. University of Sydney, 2003.

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Benjamin, Walter. Origin of the German Trauerspiel. Translated by Howard Eiland. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2019. Bennett, Jane. Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things. Durham: Duke UP, 2010. Bewes, Timothy. The Event of Postcolonial Shame. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2010. Brennan, Christopher. The Prose of Christopher Brennan. Edited by A. R. Chisholm and J. J. Quinn. Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1962. Brooks, Barbara and Judith Clark. Eleanor Dark: A Writer’s Life. Sydney: Macmillan, 1998. Carson, Susan. “Conversations with the Land: Environmental Questions and Eleanor Dark.” In Land and Identity: Proceedings of the 1997 Conference University of New England Armidale New South Wales 27–30 September 1997 , edited by Michael Deves and Jennifer A. McDonnell, 191–96. Sydney: Association for the Study of Australian Literature, 1998. Cloke, Paul, and Owain Jones. “Grounding Ethical Mindfulness for/in Nature: Trees in Their Places.” Ethics, Place and Environment 6, no. 3 (2003): 195– 214. Cooper, Melinda. “‘A Masterpiece of Camouflage’: Modernism and Interwar Australia.” Modernist Cultures 15, no. 3 (2020): 316–40. https://doi.org/ 10.3366/mod.2020.0299. Crombie, Isobel. Body Culture: Max Dupain, Photography and Australian Culture, 1919–1939. Mulgrave: Peleus Press, 2004. Curthoys, Ann. “Piddington Marion Louisa (1869–1950).” Australian Dictionary of Biography, 1988. https://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/piddington-mar ion-louisa-8044. Crotty, Martin, John Germov, and Grant Rodwell, eds. “A Race for a Place”: Eugenics, Darwinism and Social Thought and Practice in Australia. University of Newcastle: Proceedings of the History & Sociology of Eugenics Conference, 2000. Dark, Eleanor. “Australia and the Australians.” In Australia Week-End Book 3, edited by Sydney Ure Smith and Gwen Morton Spencer, 9–19. Sydney: Ure Smith Pty. Limited, 1944. ———. Sun Across the Sky. Sydney: Collins, 1946. ———. The Little Company. London: Virago, 1985. ———. Waterway. Sydney: Collins/Angus & Robertson, 1990. ———. The Timeless Land. Sydney: HarperCollins, 2013a. ———. No Barrier. Sydney: HarperCollins, 2013b. Davidson, Toby. “Frameworks of the Mystical in Australian Colonial and PostFederation Poetry.” Journal of Australian Studies 35, no. 3 (2011): 389–405. Edquist, Harriet. “Ghosts of the Past: Mapping the Colonial in Eleanor Dark’s Fiction.” In Mapping Different Geographies, edited by Karel Kriz, William Cartright and Lorenz Hurni, 247–55. Berlin: Springer, 2010.

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Frawley, Jodi. “Campaigning for Street Trees, Sydney Botanic Gardens, 1890s– 1920s.” Environment and History 15, no. 3 (2009): 303–22. Gibson, Ross. Changescapes: Complexity, Mutability, Aesthetics. Crawley: UWA Publishing, 2015. Helmreich, Stefan. Sounding the Limits of Life: Essays in the Anthropology of Biology and Beyond. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2015. Lawrence, D. H. Psychoanalysis and the Unconscious and Fantasia of the Unconscious. Mineola: Dover Publications, 2012. Levine, Caroline. Forms: Whole, Rhythm, Hierarchy, Network. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2015. Miller, Tyrus. Late Modernism: Politics, Fiction, and the Arts Between the Wars. Berkeley: U of California P, 1999. Modjeska, Drusilla. “Introduction.” In Waterway, by Eleanor Dark, v–xi. Sydney: Collins/Angus & Robertson, 1990. Roe, Michael. Nine Australian Progressives: Vitalism in Bourgeois Social Thought, 1890–1960. St. Lucia: U of Queensland P, 1984. Rooney, Brigid. “Time’s Abyss: Australian Literary Modernism and the Scene of the Ferry Wreck.” In Scenes of Reading: Is Australian Literature a World Literature?, edited by Robert Dixon and Brigid Rooney, 101–14. North Melbourne: Australian Scholarly Publishing, 2013. Saunders, Ian. “On Appropriation: Two Novels of Dark and Barnard Eldershaw.” Australian Literary Studies 20, no. 4 (2002): 287–300. Sheil, Inger. “90 Years since the Greycliffe Ferry Disaster.” Australian National Maritime Museum, 2017, https://www.sea.museum/2017/11/03/90years-since-the-greycliffe-ferry-disaster?gclid=Cj0KCQjwzbv7BRDIARIsAMA6-0BwqiWOlcNzCpoK16gDx330f3_-94Ym3LzfMQiQswNXHfatQ4uItga AvOCEALw_wcB. Stephensen, P. R. The Foundations of Culture in Australia: An Essay Towards National Self Respect. Sydney: George Allen & Unwin, 1986.

CHAPTER 5

Plans, Porosity and the Possibilities of Urban Narrative: Kylie Tennant’s Foveaux (1939)

In reality [the city] is grey: a grey-red or ochre, a grey-white. And entirely grey against sky and sea. It is this, not least, that disheartens the tourist. For anyone who is blind to forms sees little here. The city is craggy. Walter Benjamin, One-Way Street and Other Writings (1979: 169) He had loved Foveaux. He had been Foveaux’s solitary lover when she was beautiful. He still loved Foveaux. He liked the dirty, tragic, cheery people, their bravery and their horrible patience, contented in hell. He liked the streets and their very muddle of factories and houses and lanes where everything was unexpected. He liked the funny little squares where cats sat amid staghorns on the curious pillars outside houses nearly a hundred years old. He loved these old stairs and the curious blends of half tones, dull grey and white, and red and brown and yellow that all looked grey. Kylie Tennant, Foveaux (2014: 422)

The City of Sydney Archives holds fifty volumes of photographs, comprising thousands of images taken by government officials between the years 1900 and 1949.1 Some of the earliest provide a record of the 1900 outbreak of plague, showing grim men lined up behind piles of rats culled in an attempt to halt the disease’s spread. A series of albums 1 City of Sydney Archives, NSCA CRS 51, Demolition books, 1900–1949.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 M. Brayshaw, Sydney and Its Waterway in Australian Literary Modernism, Literary Urban Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-64426-0_5

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Fig. 5.1 City of Sydney. ‘Terraces, Irving St (2-4-6-8), Chippendale’. Demolition Books, NSCA CRS 51/591. City of Sydney Archives. https://archives.cit yofsydney.nsw.gov.au/nodes/view/1725833

labelled ‘condemnations and demolitions’ contains picture after picture of streets and buildings demolished during the fervour for urban planning that swept through Sydney in the early decades of the twentieth century. However, the Demolition Books, as they have come to be known colloquially, tell more than a story of destruction. Many of the photographs feature residents of the widely disparaged slums and occupants of soonto-be demolished tenements, either inadvertently captured by the camera or willingly posing for it. These were the people whose lives were transformed by large-scale urban renewal projects over which they had no control. Yet, as Sue Doyle (2005) argues, their presence is vividly felt as the most dynamic element of the Demolition Books (Fig. 5.1). A 1913 photograph shows half-demolished terrace houses on Irving Street in Chippendale. In the foreground, a mother holds her baby on her hip, smiling proudly. Near her, workers lounge and stare at the camera,

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their tools held loosely at their sides. Bare-footed children stand in a gutter full of debris, facing off with the photographer. One girl has her hands on her hips; her stance is proud but the expression on her face is difficult to read: she could be smiling; she could be grimacing. Another girl stands a little apart from the rest. Caught in movement, she is blurred and ghost-like. This is a photograph in which we find Benjamin’s ‘spark of contingency’, where the ‘immediacy of that long-forgotten moment’ extends beyond the photographer’s purpose to touch us in the future (1979: 243). Alongside destruction and obvious poverty, there is joy and autonomy. In front of half-destroyed, shell-like terraces, we see people performing a small, fascinating diorama of daily life. As Doyle writes, The subtle, insistent activities of [the people’s] daily lives persisted in undeclared opposition to the triumphalist rhetoric of urban renewal. Their presence represents an affirmation of the everyday, an assertion of its constancy, its continuity, in the face of larger, more powerful waves of circumstance.

Like the photographs of the Demolition Books, Kylie Tennant’s second novel, Foveaux (1939), tells the story of urban renewal in Sydney through the city’s poorest residents, those least in control of the process but most affected by it. The narrative charts twenty-five years in the life of the inner-city locality of Foveaux, modelled on Surry Hills, tracking the ‘momentous slow change’ of urban development, beginning with the widening of the main street and ending with the suburb being incorporated into the city of Sydney (17). As Harriet Edquist writes, the book is ‘as much a biography of the suburb as it is of its inhabitants’ (2008: 60). If this is so, then the novel begins after the suburb’s death. ‘There is now no Municipality of Foveaux’, the first line reads. ‘Its boundaries are obliterated, its identity merged with that of the city of Sydney’ (9). The whole book is thus a memory, returning a forgotten place and people to legibility. In 1912 when the novel begins, the newly elected Mayor of Foveaux, the ironically named ‘Honest’ John Hutchinson, sketches out a map of the district on the back of one of his campaign leaflets. He has plans to engineer the demolition of the suburb and sell the resumed land for motor garages and repair shops. ‘If I pull it off, I ought to make enough out of this to retire’, he says. After all, he adds, one can ‘never have enough money’ (82). Honest John is a shrewd politician, and with his

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working-class and poverty-stricken constituents he speaks not of personal wealth but advancement for Foveaux as a whole. ‘The high tide of progress surges in upon us’, he tells the people from a balcony above Dennison Square (81). ‘The waves of progress … will sweep away the wreckage which for years has cumbered Foveaux’ (81). Such notions are viewed suspiciously by the older residents: ‘Progress, progress’, says Mr Sutton. ‘Rolling on? Yes, like Juggernaut’ (25).2 In Waterway, Eleanor Dark evokes and then questions the Sesquicentenary narrative of teleological national progress. In Foveaux, Tennant similarly though perhaps more polemically, critiques the ideology of urban development as it was deployed in Sydney during the early twentieth century. In this period, the press labelled areas like Surry Hills ‘decaying anachronisms’ that were preventing Sydney from assuming its rightful place as a world city and a modern metropolis (Keating 1991: 12). Between 1909 and 1912, Sydney City Council launched at least 22 resumption schemes. These schemes did not include viable plans to rehouse displaced residents, who, as Christopher Keating explains, ‘were largely unprotected by municipal or governmental authorities from the worst abuses of rampant urban capitalism’ (1991: 53). Tennant’s novel exposes the self-interested and at times prejudicial motives for urban renewal, and its failure to account for the material needs of the workingclass and poor majority. As the narrative unfolds, a number of schemes for transforming Foveaux get under way. There is Honest John’s plan for ‘motor everything’, and a developer who builds luxury flats in an effort to refashion Foveaux as Sydney’s newest exclusive neighbourhood (83). There is also the work of the Slum Abolition League, who take their cues from the socialist experiment of post-war Vienna and the modernist architecture of Le Corbusier in developing a plan for high-rise public housing. All of these are lacking, because they are either unwilling or

2 Tennant’s decision to begin the novel in 1912 is not arbitrary. 1910 until the end of World War I was the ‘heyday of the active planning movement’ in Australia (Freestone 2012: 79). Famously, in 1912 an international competition was launched to find a design for Australia’s new capital city, Canberra. The 137 entries from fifteen countries represented the best and most modern in planning theory and practice; Walter Burley Griffin’s winning entry epitomised the spirit of utopian city planning (Reps 1997: 2). In 1912, the New South Wales’ Institute of Architects was addressed by John F. Hennesy on the ‘most up to date and important subject’ of garden-suburb planning (qtd. Freestone 1987: 53). Additionally, 1912 saw the building of Kingsclere in Potts Point, which is most likely Sydney’s first apartment building.

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unable to address in any practical way the basic problems of housing, food, safety and health for the city’s most vulnerable residents. Instead, Tennant shows how residents adapt, improvise and help each other to survive. These strategies form the basis for Tennant’s model of true urban progress. Tennant’s engagement with the waterway is multifaceted. She uses it as an allegorical and symbolic resource, but she also highlights the uneven development of Sydney’s water infrastructure as part of her politicaleconomic critique. Tennant’s close attention to this infrastructure and the very real inequalities embedded in it sets it apart from the other novels in this book. Urban geographers point out the ‘continuously shifting power geometry’ that results from the flow of water through cities (Swyngedouw 2004: 147). Erik Swyngedouw explains: These multiple metabolisms of water are structured and organised through relations of power, that is relations of domination and subordination, of access and exclusion, of emancipation and repression. (Swyngedouw 2004: 135)

The first one hundred and fifty years of Surry Hills’ history is a perfect case study for Swyngedouw’s argument. In 1793 Captain Joseph Foveaux was granted a large parcel of land on the then outskirts of the colony, in an area lamented by Governor Phillip as ‘a kind of heath, poor, sandy, and full of swamps’ (qtd. Wotherpoon and Keating 2009). Over the next century, Foveaux’s ‘Surrey Hills Farm’ became the suburb of Surry Hills, largely through unchecked, ‘shambolic’ private development (Wotherpoon and Keating 2009). Throughout the nineteenth century, Sydney Municipal Council did not possess the power or the will to enforce any regulations regarding block size, dwelling type, water supply, sewerage and drainage, and as a result the suburb took on all the worst characteristics of a slum. Overcrowded tenements, poor drainage and poverty came to a head in 1900 with an outbreak of the plague (Wotherpoon and Keating 2009). Well into the first decades of the twentieth century, the suburb was regularly evoked by moral crusaders as evidence for the connection between disease and criminality. In Tennant’s Foveaux—perhaps named thus to highlight the role played by landowners and private enterprise in the slum’s founding— water supply and drainage issues are noted as primary causes of the suburb’s blight. Residents share a communal water tank, lack bathrooms

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of any kind and the floorboards of their tenements are rotted through with damp, which ‘seeped down and lay under the houses … just as it had lain in the original swamp over which the houses were built’ (128). ‘The yards were paved with brick’, Tennant writes, all the drainage and rubbish ran cheerfully down a grating in the middle. This usually stank to heaven and gave rise to the belief that the drainage also dated from the convict days. (126)

Tennant regularly adopts a mode of gently satiric humour, invoking the suburb’s notorious reputation while also redirecting focus to real failures of urban governance. Showing a Foveaux tenement to a potential tenant, Bramley Cornwall admits ‘It’s not much of a place’: ‘The drains are in a dreadful condition. No, the murder wasn’t in the backyard. It was outside the back-gate’ (371). From Surry Hills’s past as a swamp and the waterway’s omnipresence in the city, Tennant builds an allegorical schema with which to structure her biography of the suburb. The novel begins with a poetic epigraph, apparently written by the author: This is the littoral, the long pale shore, The gleaming sand, the cliffs where shallow foam Mutes in its murmurings the rousing roar Of curved green crests that crashed the proud ship home, The silver sandhills, where, uneasily, The land receives the rejects of the sea. (5, italics in original)

With the ‘gleaming sand’, the ‘proud ship’ and ‘silver sandhills’, Tennant evokes the waterway’s symbolic capital, but the final couplet highlights what this vision rejects. Upon these hills the land ‘uneasily’ receives the ‘rejects of the sea’ (5). Foveaux, idealistic yet weary architect Jimmy Rolfe says, ‘is a place for wrecks’: ‘All the wrecks cast up on the shore-line of the city. Who worries about the littoral or where the barnacles build?’ (123). Tennant’s depiction of the suburb is founded on the metaphor of the littoral, which she figures in a way analogous to Anna Ryan’s definition of this space as ‘an environment where an awareness of spatial experience is heightened […] Nothing is static. Nothing remains the same’ (2012: 7, 9). Streets and places are renamed accordingly: Little Albion Street becomes Little Torrent Street; Byswater Lane replaces Batman Lane. The notorious slum Frog Hollow, from whence came some of Sydney’s

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most enduring legends of criminal salaciousness, becomes Plug Alley, as if its residents are detritus swirling down a drain. As conditions worsen during the Depression, Honest John’s ‘tide of progress’ becomes a ‘tide of bitterness’: Over some faces the invisible tide of bitterness washed, leaving them puffed and pallid; others it coarsened to red blubber, loosening the flesh, wrinkling the skin to dirty leather, flaked with grey stubble, like an encrusting salt on cheeks and chin, but always changing, distorting and disfiguring, as the sea water wears the grey rocks. (282)

The littoral metaphor structures the novel’s combination of despair at the grim reality of life for the slum dwellers, those displaced ‘rejects of the sea’, and hope that it may be transformed. This hope is captured by the novel’s five-part structure, which is modelled on the hydrological cycle in its capacity as a ‘potentially universal model of change and transformation’ (Strang 2005: 101). This structure reflects the novel’s hope that life can be transformed for the slum dwellers, those displaced ‘rejects of the sea’. After the prologue, ‘Ebb Tide’ begins in 1912 and moves through World War I, ‘Full Tide’ takes place in the post-war boom from 1924, and ‘The Surf’ sees Foveaux tossed in the wild water of the Great Depression. The book’s final section, ‘The Rocks’, concludes in 1936, with the possibility that at least some of the suburb’s residents may be able to scramble to safety. Tennant’s work in the thirties and forties corresponds with the ‘heyday of the documentary’ in leftist literature and modernist cultures (Rifkind 2009: 163). Like George Orwell, Mulk Raj Anand and Jack London, Tennant lived her novel before she wrote it, taking up residence in a series of slum houses in Surry Hills and Darlinghurst (Grant 2006: 32). Interesting, Orwell reviewed Tennant’s next novel, The Battlers (1941), chastising its ‘clumsy’ writing and ‘feminine coyness about bad language’, but commending its sincerity of feeling and ‘truthful picture of local conditions’ (qtd. Matthews 1981: 65). Critics including Leo Mellor and Kristen Bluemel have claimed Orwell for late or intermodernism, citing among other qualities the intriguing results of his sociopolitical focus and experimentation with ‘different forms of representability’ (Mellor 2011: 14; see also Bluemel 2009). I want to position Tennant within a similar frame. Foveaux aims for documentary realism, regularly citing dates and real events to authorise its version of history. Yet, Tennant’s novel has

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significant ideological and aesthetic aims that disorder its realism in compelling ways, producing a kind of ‘documentary modernism’, where realist representation collides with ‘symbolic and allegorical deformations of reality’ (Rifkind 2009: 164). Tennant avoids Cusack and Dark’s modernist experiments with interiority; her interests in the documentary mode and social collectives manifest as omniscient narration and extensive dialogue. There may be political impetus here: with plot and major developments mostly conveyed through conversation, the working-class voice becomes the dominant force propelling the narrative forward. When women go to get water from the communal tank, they take the opportunity to gather as a ‘compact little squad’, gossip and share the burdens of their lives (18). Reading women’s speech in the novel, Diana Caira argues that Tennant’s ‘unleashing of the voice of the hitherto mute Australian woman’ contributed to the ‘feminisation’ of the Australian larrikin myth (1994: 146). Tennant’s use of eye dialect can seem like a vaudevillian performance of the Australian vernacular. Take Mr Noblett, lamenting the eviction of his family from their rented slum house: “All these years … I been acting like a ‘uman being, doin’ me best for me feller man an’ now I’m expected to lead the ‘orse out into the street an’ me fambly with it. Where we goin’ to? An’ who’s to pay me the valoo of the trade I built up round ‘here? Damned if I’ll get out.” (212)

Is this celebrating the ‘language of Foveaux’, or ridiculing it (334)? Speech is a satiric as well as realist tool for Tennant. In Foveaux, the ‘disenfranchised at once seem to speak and be spoken for’, as Candida Rifkin writes in her discussion of Canadian examples of 1930s documentary modernism (2009: 172). This ‘complicates what might otherwise appear to be naïve or didactic realism with questions of subject constitution and literary position-takings’ (172). In an extremely critical essay for Southerly in 1957, T. Inglis Moore accused Tennant’s work of being marked by ‘lack of depth in characterisation’, ‘little selectiveness’, ‘no true plot or dramatic action, no conflict or suspense, no point except the picture of such’, and a confusion over the relationship between tragedy and comedy in what he called her ‘tragicomedies’ (5, 6). In a word, he summarised her books as suffering from ‘formlessness’ (5). In Foveaux, however, the narrative’s apparent looseness is enclosed by highly exaggerated architectonics: the book is divided into

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a prologue and four even sections. Each section has numbered chapters, and each chapter is divided into two to four sub-sections. Reading the multivalent, discordant narrative against this highly structured outer form, we see a contrast emerge between form and formlessness, strict boundaries and looseness, teleology and cumulative circulation. This contrast reflects the novel’s exploration of and challenge to socio-spatial hierarchies and the grand narratives of urban planning. Following Jessica Berman’s call to read a text’s ‘rhetorical activity’ in the context of its relationship to the various ‘circumstances of modernity and the challenges they pose to systems of representation’ (2011: 7, 8), I argue that Tennant’s idiosyncratic style and form become productive when read in the context of the novel’s questioning of teleological progress and celebration of the adaptive and improvisatory strategies of the urban poor. This argument refutes the general critical consensus about Tennant as a writer, which commends her journalististic accuracy but minimises her creative and conceptual capacities.3 In a 1953 essay Dorothy Auchterlonie contrasts George Eliot and Kylie Tennant in order to highlight the latter’s supposed inconsistencies as a writer of social realist fiction.4 While the former, Auchterlonie writes, keeps her ‘architectural aim clearly in mind all the time’, Tennant, moves not forward, but in a series of eddies, like a wind that bloweth where it listeth; if she has in mind a work of architecture she certainly has no blueprint for it, and the result is rather like a bush shack that has had a room added here and there as the family has grown. (399)

The issue for Auchterlonie is that Tennant’s formal choices frustrate the requirements of its genre, social realism. However, when we reframe 3 An exception here is a conference paper by Karen Attard (1998). In one of the few

recent pieces of criticism on Tennant’s work, Attard reads The Battlers (1941) through the prism of nomadology, connecting characters’ nomadic lives with what she identifies as the nomadic traits in Tennant’s writing, specifically, qualities such as the rambling plot, large cast of characters and the importance of geography and spatiality over history and temporality. Though brief, Attard’s paper is one of the only examples of scholarly work that attempts to engage with and critically analyse Tennant’s craftsmanship as a writer. 4 In the late 1970s John Docker argued that the work of Tennant and other 1930s and 1940s writers had been ‘suppressed’ by what he calls Australian ‘New Criticism’ and their text-centred approach (Matthews 1981: 72). Such an approach, Docker argued, ignored the importance of social context to Tennant’s novels. See Matthews (1981) for further discussion of Docker’s argument and Tennant’s critical reception.

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Foveaux as documentary modernism rather than unsuccessful social realism, Auchterlonie’s evocative critique becomes a fascinating description of narrative strategy. Auchterlonie defines Tennant’s narrative structure as a series of eddies rather than a single engulfing tide, a house improvised by its occupants rather than built according to an architectural blueprint. Summarised in this way, it is possible to argue that in the case of Foveaux, the novel reproduces through form the political thesis of the narrative, which celebrates and champions the tenacity of working-class people who thrive through values such as improvisation and adaptation. Thinking laterally, the book’s odd narrative method can be seen as the textual equivalent of the children mugging for the camera in the Demolition Books photographs: both show how the intervention of working-class lives can subtly undermine dominant definitions of progress in urban modernity. Just as the children in the images divert our attention from the supposed subject of the official photographer, the soon-to-be demolished buildings, Tennant’s novel forces us to be different kinds of readers. We cannot rely on a single driving plot to guide us forward; instead, we must search out from among the messiness those moments of clarity and real insight, or surprisingly deft imagery, that make the narrative meaningful. This aligns us with the book’s characters, who must sift through chaos and despair in search of opportunities for change and brief instances of joy.

Porosity and Possibility in Foveaux Built on sandhills and swamps, Foveaux is a place whose geography and architecture still seem to take inspiration from its littoral ecology. As Veronica Strang points out, swamps are constitutively ambiguous: neither wholly land or water, they are often depicted as ‘uncanny fluid spaces’ (2015: 60–61). Accordingly, a kind of porosity defines space and sociality in Foveaux. I take my definition of porosity from Walter Benjamin’s essay ‘Naples’ (1924), which he wrote in collaboration Asja L¯acis. L¯acis suggested the idea of porosity, drawing on Naples’ famous Tufa sandstone. In the essay, porosity denotes spatial, social and temporal mutability, the intermingling of the old and new, the personal and the communal, the sacred and the profane. Naples is changeable and changing: an ancient port city, it was part of Italy but orientated towards the rest of the world. By the mid-twenties when Benjamin visited, it

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was no longer entirely traditional, but the ‘structuring boundaries of modern capitalism’ had ‘not yet been established’ (Buck-Morss 1991: 26). Such changeability meant that the city was subject to competing forces—the church, camorra, politics, capital—none of which held total power. Furthermore, Mussolini’s fascist government had just taken power, and Benjamin and L¯ a cis knew this would have an enormous impact on the country. Residents of Naples, they write, are aware that they are participating in ‘one of the pictures of Neapolitan street life that will never return’ (1979: 170). A lack of usual social and architectural boundaries, coupled with intense poverty, means porosity becomes the ‘inexhaustible law of the life of this city, reappearing everywhere’ (171). The city is characterised by ‘spatial anarchy, social intermingling and, above all, impermanence’ (Buck-Morss 1991: 26). In Naples, there is mutual influence between people and the city; the city’s ‘porous’ architecture and geography reflect the ‘porous’ nature of its inhabitants’ lives. Decay and dilapidation constantly give rise to the unexpected; buildings and streets become theatres of what Benjamin calls ‘new, unforeseen constellations’ (1979: 169). In this way, porosity is both destructive and productive. On the one hand, Benjamin and L¯acis acknowledge that porosity allows the city to be dominated by the competing influences of the church, organised crime and capital. On the other, Benjamin’s comic and celebratory essay suggests that even the poorest Neapolitans find ways to leverage the city’s porous boundaries to their advantage. Drawing on the ‘Naples’ sketch, Andrew Benjamin mobilises porosity as ‘inexhaustible potential’, defining its ‘movement of interpenetration’ as an ‘undoing’ through which urban conditions can be productively reconfigured (2007: 39, 37).5 In Foveaux, I argue, the municipality’s porousness is similarly dialectical, denoting both a lack of safety and security, and opportunity to challenge the status quo. Foveaux is marked by the interpenetration of the old and new. In swampish Foveaux, Sydney’s violent, riotous past seeps in with the damp:

5 Some urban theorists have made porosity a principle of inclusive urban development.

Architect and activist Stavros Stavrides argues that porosity ‘articulates urban life’, as it ‘loosens the borders which are erected to preserve a strict spatial and temporal order’ (2007: 67). Porosity also has links with Quentin Stevens’ Ludic City (2007), Karen Franck and Quentin Stevens’s (2007) loose space, and more tangentially, the psychogeographical dérive of the Situationists in the 1960s.

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People maintained that those mean stone houses, narrow and verminous and dark, had been built by convicts, and if so, some of the convict tradition had soaked into them. (126)

Now, settler Australia celebrates its convicts as founding figures of the semi-apocryphal maverick, ‘larrikin’ national type. In the first decades of the twentieth century, however, Australia’s penal origins were a source of anxiety for the young Commonwealth and an affront to middle-class decency. As Sue Doyle (2005) explains, ‘the destruction of Sydney’s pre-modern built environment was a step towards erasing the material remnants of its shameful history’. Leftist writers like Tennant refused this retrospective editing. In 1939, the year Foveaux was published, Miles Franklin and Dymphna Cusack published their satirical Pioneers on Parade, in which the Sesquicentenary celebrations are almost derailed by the revelation of a high society family’s convict heritage. In Foveaux, even the semi-respectable houses of upper and middle Foveaux are architecturally unsound on the inside and haunted by the ghosts of the nation’s violent past. ‘They looked sane enough from the outside’, Tennant writes of the houses, substantial works in weatherboard and stone, with deep, paved verandas and green wooden shutters to their long French windows; but inside they went wild. A stairway sprang up like a parliamentary question from an irrelevant nook and continued to tie itself into strange knots amid a jigsaw puzzle of attics and alcoves and deep hidden cupboards, out of which might as fittingly emerge the skeleton of a long dead convict in manacles as Mrs Webb’s space bedding. (26)

In 1912, the geography of Foveaux is highly stratified and abides by class distinctions. The residents of Upper Foveaux breathe ‘rarefied air’ in their stately mansions, Middle Foveaux is pleasant residential and some lodging houses, while ‘the Foot’ harbours nefarious Ogham Street and the slums of Plug Alley (11). As the slum Frog Hollow was in real life, Plug Alley is a jumble of broken-down tenements built below street level and accessible only by a set of steep stairs. Nevertheless, points of contact emphasise that boundaries between the suburb’s classed spheres are porous. An important landmark in Foveaux is the stairs that lead from the main road of Lennox Street down into Plug Alley, while the pub ‘Rose of Denmark’ is a ‘meeting-place’ for Middle Foveaux and the Foot (11). In the first pages of the novel, a small boy from the slums standing on

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tiptoes spies the gardens and statues of grand Foveaux House, in a way that suggests spatial and social boundaries are not final but fluid (9–10). Tennant’s main characters are defined by their liminal social position. Many of them are what Margaret Dick calls ‘displaced persons’ (1996: 37): they belong to the so-called fallen middle-classes, who are experiencing hard times but are not long-term slum dwellers. Jimmy Rolfe says he is ‘half-bird and half-fish’: ‘a pseudo-boarder living in a scullery, half outcast, half lodger and a quarter platypus’ (59). Most of the characters move homes at least once during the narrative, and many spend it wandering from place to place, seeking out cheap accommodation. Before it is demolished as part of the resumption project, many take up residence in the boarding and lodging house run by Mrs Webb, which is of neither Middle Foveaux nor the Foot, but occupies a kind of threshold place; indeed, it is actually two houses named as one: Between the brown surges of the terraces in Lennox Street and the tranquil upper reaches around Foveaux House was “Mrs Webb’s Place”, two old stone cottages, isolated by a lane on either side, where dwelt a little colony of folk, with one foot in gentility and a desperate other boot sliding downhill towards the workers of the terraces and the flotsam of the alleys. (26)

A major element of porous urban life is the interpenetration of private and public spheres. As Benjamin writes, private life ‘is dispersed, porous, and commingled … each private attitude or act is permeated by streams of communal life’ (174). Tennant says it simply: ‘Plug Alley had no secrets’ (126). Neighbours ‘crack shameless and ribald jokes’ about each other, while the Foveaux landladies play the game ‘Keeping to Yourself’, which entails ‘finding out as much as you can about the women next door and their lodgers without giving any information in return’ (126, 205). Any sound in Plug Alley at night, Tennant writes, ‘would bring the unseen dwellers to their narrow doors, so many sets of fixed attentive eyes’ (50). Houses have doors that give ‘directly onto the footpath, [so that] anyone passing could see in’ (127). Seemingly part of the architecture, the residents ‘emerge from the slits in the wall’, ‘curious heads protrud[ing] slowly like limpets from their shells’ (50). They gather on ‘communal verandas’ or street corners, and children prefer to play in the street (35). Benjamin marvels at places in Naples that have to do double or even triple duty, at cellars which are both ‘sleeping places and storehouses’ (169). As

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Stavros Stavrides explains, porosity brings about a ‘loosening of socially programmed correspondences between function and place’ (2007: 67). In Foveaux, very few people have houses of their own: ‘if you had a “place” of more than one room, it was almost blasphemy not to take lodgers’ (188). In most houses, ‘the front room was in many cases bedroom and kitchen both, with another family living in the back room’ (126). Thus, even private space is, in some sense, public space. Both Benjamin and Tennant link porosity with community. In Naples, overcrowding means that ‘families interpenetrate’ among the poor (1979: 176). During the Depression, a similar process occurs in Foveaux: families are forced to deposit ‘a child here and another there, and the parents with the people next door’ (272). Like Dark, Tennant suggests social problems must be faced by the collective. In Foveaux, even feuding families forget their quarrel if someone falls ill: ‘Then erstwhile enemies would immediately bring in food and lend old coats … and wait on the invalid’ (128). In this way, the novel highlights how survival in the slums depends upon ethical relations maintained despite the chaos of the space (Benjamin 1999: 174). Non-familial relationships are some of the most successful in the novel: the triumvirate of Jimmy, Bramley Cornish and Linda ‘Linnie’ Montague is the emotional heart of the narrative, while Bramley’s brother Tommy becomes an honorary member of the large Noblett clan, the father Bob treating him ‘as though he was just one of his numerous offspring … a few strays didn’t matter’ (58). Later, Linnie will share a room with and support slatternly Mabel out of pity for her newborn baby, Patty. Thus, Tennant exposes the possibility embedded in the porosity of Foveaux. Old age pensioners cling to their ‘rotten’ houses in Plug Alley because they mean ‘independence, home, and freedom’ (128). Throughout the narrative Tennant highlights moments or spaces where ordinary rhythms of every day working-class life prosper: there were peaceful little stretches of footpath past which the tide of commerce raced unregarded. There were whole terraces where old gentlemen sat on the front steps in the sunshine and their wives came out with buckets of water and carefully washed down the pavement as though it were the face of a favourite child. (217)

Tennant here juxtaposes the powerful current of capital with residents’ embodied affection for the place, played out in the daily rhythms of their

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lives. As the book continues, these moments and spaces will increasingly be swept up by the ‘tide of progress’. Nevertheless, the narrative continually affirms their necessity, and other strategies for eking out some space of the residents’ own within an increasingly depersonalised urban milieu. In the city of Naples, ‘an improvisatory culture [is] released, even nourished, by the city’s rapid decay’ (Buck-Morss 1991: 27). ‘Porosity results’, write Benjamin and L¯acis, ‘from the passion for improvisation, which demands that space and opportunity be at any price preserved’ (1979: 170). Improvisation and adaptation are Foveauvian values that Tennant champions alongside communal spirit. She highlights the residents’ adaptive methods of bricolage, or what they call ‘making-do’. They drive cars built from ‘a mongrel mixture of parts’; they sell rags or go door-todoor hawking shoelaces in cardboard suitcases (199, 328). Every piece of furniture in the Cornish family’s living room serves multiple purposes: a dilapidated rocking-chair is also Tommy’s bed, the sofa is at once Bramley’s bed, a seat, and a cover for the woodbox, while a ‘great cedar sea-chest’ does double-duty as a seat and wardrobe (57). In Depression hostels, men and women live ‘making the best of what little remained’, pooling their resources and salvaging what they can find (323). One man constructs an electric torch and wireless set from discarded parts (322). Such acts, produced by the ability to exploit dilapidation and make the best of what can be salvaged from the city, are celebrated by Tennant as minor victories against the systematic injustices to which the poorer classes are subjected. As previously stated, the loose form of Tennant’s novel reinforces the narrative of urban modernity it wishes to advocate. Indeed, the term ‘loose space’ is used by urban theorists Karen Franck and Quentin Stevens, drawing on concepts similar to Benjamin’s porosity, to describe the way in which urban spaces need to retain the opportunity for the ‘unfolding of social encounters in public, whether they are forms of commerce, expression, adventure, escape or innovation’ (2007: 30). Through these encounters, Franck and Quentin argue, utilitarian space can retain the productive ‘looseness’ that they mark as an essential component of the liveable city. Remaking space as ‘loose’ adequately summarises how the inhabitants of Foveaux make it liveable. In the prologue, residents of the Foot steal palings from the church fence for firewood. Later, as construction of the luxury Foveaux Flats begins, the new buildings are not only ‘a spectacle but […] an opportunity’: ‘Joists and beams would

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float away mysteriously; bricks dissolved into thin air. A wheelbarrow, any night, might decide to take itself off with a bag of cement’ (204). Acts of collaboration, improvisation and adaptation loosen the hold of capital and class over Foveaux. This process is reproduced by the structure of Tennant’s novel, which juxtaposes a strict architectural outer form with narrative looseness. Thus, Foveaux works through both form and content to proffer an alternative narrative of urban modernity that acknowledges the need to retain opportunities for even the most disenfranchised citizens to participate and intervene in the city. To the tourist, Benjamin and L¯acis maintain, Naples appears ‘grey’ and ‘craggy’ (169). But the tourist is ‘blind’ to form (169). Benjamin tells us that Naples’ grey is also grey-white, grey-red or ochre: already this seemingly simple colour designation hints at alternative modes of seeing, if only we look closely (169). As Andrew Benjamin explains, Seeing into the grey—rather than merely to see grey—is to allow for sight to acquire its own type of porosity. Again, what is at work here is the movement of interpenetration … Seeing grey dissolves surfaces—or rather dissolves surfaces as given in opposition to depths. (2007: 41)

Simply, in Naples’s grey, there is ‘inexhaustible potentiality’ (41). Throughout Foveaux, the colour grey is repeatedly referenced: the suburb has ‘grey roads’, ‘grey stairs twisting up’, ‘thin grey’ women with ‘coarse grey hair’ (88, 127). In the middle of the Depression, even the usually luminous harbour is ‘flickering grey’ (232). Right at the end of the novel, however, Bramley Cornish reclaims this unremarkable colour, which until this point has reminded us of the pitiful existence of Foveaux’s inhabitants. Having spent years railing against the hopeless poverty and squalor of the place in which he grew up, Bramley, fast approaching middleage, capitulates and admits his love for Foveaux, for its ‘muddle’ of streets where ‘everything [is] unexpected’ (422). He loves the ‘funny little squares’ with old houses and old stairs (422). He loves its inhabitants, ‘the dirty, tragic people’ and their ability to adapt to it and survive ‘with bravery and horrible patience’ (422). Embracing the place’s peculiarities, Bramley sees what ‘all looked grey’ as simultaneously ‘the curious blends of half tones, dull grey and white, and red and brown and yellow’ (422). In both ‘Naples’ and Foveaux, grey takes on complexity when one knows a place intimately and embraces the particularities that allow alternative visions of it to emerge. The metaphor here is also useful

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for thinking through how Tennant’s writing is working. What appears to be a book with no governing formal or stylistic principles is actually engaged with modernist debates about urban planning and development, playing out these debates through considered aesthetic choices and a narrative form that reproduces the looseness and porosity it highlights in material urban space.

Competing Narratives of Urban Progress In the first decades of the twentieth century in Sydney, there was little regulation of private development, a housing shortage, and a movement for large-scale social reform that the city council only undertook slowly and ineffectually (Freestone 1987: 79–82). ‘If progress can be seen as an affliction’, Keating comments, ‘then Surry Hills was a chronic sufferer throughout the first three decades of the century’ (1991: 77).6 Through the novel, Tennant shows how competing interests of idealism, capital and politics—the latter two often indistinct from each other—play out as they attempt to shape Foveaux. Honest John talks about how much money he will make from selling land for motor garages. The Slum Abolition League, a volunteer organisation run from an attic bedroom in a lodging house, advocates for their ‘Porpoise’, a plan for high-rise public housing modelled after modernist, European designs. Bill Bross Junior builds luxury flats that during the Depression are subdivided into tenement houses and become exactly the kind of slum they were meant to replace. Against these, the novel’s most defining image of the fervour for urban progress is the resumed land that remains empty, unsold and unused for years. Tennant lets this stand as a monument to the inadequacy of each approach to develop a viable future for the locality. As a self-interested government official and a developer in league with the local council, Honest John Hutchison and Bill Bross Junior represent the interests of capitalist democracy. Adept at playing the ‘classic part of the far-sighted civic father’, on the eve of his re-election Honest John makes promises to the ‘fine working men’s families settling in Foveaux’:

6 Keating is responding to A Gentle Shipwreck (1975), Lewis Rodd’s memoir of growing up poor in Surry Hills in the first two decades of the century. Rodd writes that in this period, ‘progress afflicted Sydney’s town council’ (77). Rodd was Kylie Tennant’s husband, and the Cornish family of Foveaux was modelled on the Rodds.

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‘it is the Council’s work’, he proclaims, ‘to see that they have living conditions worthy of them, good light, water supply, wide streets…’ (210, 75). In actual fact, Hutchison owns a timber yard and makes a profit from every development plan that goes before the council: ‘You can’t even build a mud-pie in the backyard’, scoffs one of his constituents, ‘without he’s got a finger in it’ (24).7 Indeed, Hutchison conceives of himself as divinely appointed to transform Foveaux: ‘Pull all the houses down and slash roads through the void like Divine commands, direct, peremptory and unwavering’ (210). The people of Foveaux remain suspicious of such visions of progress. ‘I’ve no time for progress and civic advancement’, says Mr Sutton at the beginning of the book. ‘I’ve seen too much of it. The progress is always of money into someone’s pocket’ (25). An alternative vision of progress and civic advancement is developed by the Slum Abolition League, formed by Bramley Cornish, Linda Montague, the Reverend Adam Atwater and Jimmy Rolfe in the mid1920s. Contributing to Flora Eldershaw’s The Peaceful Army in 1938, Tennant argued that ‘pioneers’ were still to be found in the capital cities. These were the small volunteer reform organisations which recognised that the complexities and inequalities of city life ‘demand[ed] co-operation’ and worked at ‘heaving up the flagstones of tradition’ (1988: 143, 142). When Foveaux begins, Jimmy Rolfe certainly wants to heave up flagstones, proclaiming that he will ‘remould this city nearer to what a city should be’ (61). Plug Alley is a ‘hole’, Rolfe says, but even the homes of the rich in Sydney are ‘dumps’ (66, 62). Jimmy is an architect who recognises that his idealism has no place in modern commercial architecture: ‘When I went [to the firm] I saw myself designing palaces and museums and God knows what. Huh!’ (61). Like Stead’s Baruch and Joseph, Jimmy looks to Europe for inspiration: ‘Overseas … they’re really building ’, he says. ‘They’d tear down the whole of Foveaux for a chicken run’ (64, emphasis in original). One day, Rolfe announces, he’ll be putting ‘eight-storey buildings over this hole’ (64–65).

7 Tennant may have modelled Hutchison on Allen Taylor, ‘timber tycoon, shipowner and avid slum-clearer’, who became Lord Mayor of Sydney in 1905. In 1909, at the Royal Commission on the Improvement of Sydney, ‘Taylor spoke at length about traffic flow to Central Station, tramway access to the eastern suburbs and enhancing the effect that factories had on the values of, and therefore the rates payable on, city property. Not once did he mention the people who would be displaced to facilitate these boons’ (Keating 1991: 71).

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Jimmy’s plans are waylaid by the Great War. After service and some time travelling, he returns to Foveaux tired, old and chronically ill. Ironically referring to himself as the ‘returned mariner’, he claims that all he wants to do is ‘get ground into the mud with all the other wrecks’ (120). In 1924, the Foveaux to which he returns is an even more confused mess of factories, cheap ‘residentials’ and letting rooms. ‘When the factories began to come up the hill, the people went out’, laments the socialist elder Duncan (123). For Duncan, the state of Foveaux is ‘an indictment of the capitalist economy—a burning indictment’ (124). Bramley, who Jimmy jokingly appointed as his deputy in remoulding the city before the war when Bramley was just a boy, suggests the Slum Abolition League. Bram works for the firm of Bross, Twyford and Massingham, which is in the process of buying resumed land to build luxury flats. Bramley, however, dreams of a future for Foveaux that includes affordable public housing. The main work of the organisation is writing letters and articles exposing the realities of slum life and calling for their replacement with adequate public housing. Linda Montague is responsible for the majority of the league’s output. Nicknamed Lightning, Linnie finds time to write between caring for her ailing mother, keeping house and working at the corner store. Linnie is particularly skilled at rousing public sympathy, writing exaggerated stories of poverty-struck children and interviews with ‘overseas visitors who proclaim the slums a “disgrace”’ (149). Like Stead, Tennant highlights Sydney’s dynamic publishing scene in the interwar period as she charts the Slum Abolition League’s attempts to harness the power of the press to swing public opinion in favour of their cause. As Jimmy says, one has to know ‘what these little magazines want, and give it to them’ (150). This is Tennant’s sly wink at her own craft, and an ironic jab at middle-class voyeurism. While Linda writes, Jimmy plans. The League’s idealistic vision for the future of the slums is chiefly inspired by his experience of post-war Vienna’s experimental, ‘municipal socialism’ (Gruber 1991: 6). As Jimmy says, “It’s no use pulling down slums unless you do it on a big scale. They did that in Vienna. By gosh, you ought to see the joints they put up there. Parks round them. Little places for the kids to play. Plenty of sunlight. Workers’ flats. But what flats.” (124)

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From 1919 to 1934, the independent socialist government of Vienna launched ambitious public housing, health, education and social welfare programs (Gruber 1991: 6). In the space of five years the government built 63,924 new houses, 58,667 of which were apartments. This equated to homes for almost 200,000 Viennese (46). A leading socialist publication applauded Vienna in this period as a ‘Mekka [sic] to which socialists the world over were drawn’ (qtd. Gruber 1991: 46). Here, modern urban planning and architecture is conceived in the language of religious salvation, as teleological progress for the masses. The same sort of fervour underpins the work of the Slum Abolition League. Their plan is for highrise workers’ flats surrounded by green space on resumed slum land. The League call this plan ‘The Porpoise’, suggesting regeneration and resurrection through the idea that modern, high-rise housing and green space will allow the working-class to ride the tide of development without being pulled beneath the swell. The Porpoise in its capacity as a religious symbol also tallies with modernist planning discourse, in which the idea of progress was seen in Judeo-Christian terms, as a ‘single, unified, beneficent and future-directed force’ (Boyd Whyte 2003: 7). There is also the sense that the Slum Abolition League entertains the notion of a Benjaminian cycle of destruction and construction. As Linnie proclaims to Rolfe, “They’re all dead here … I’ve been here all my life, choking in it. The apathy—the sodden acceptance … the always-has-been and always-will-be stuff. That’s why I’m keen to see Plug Alley come down. Like the hole in the dyke, a start.” (182)

Rolfe concurs: ‘Let the city flow out this way and break the place to bits as it flows’ (182). In its place, they offer the ‘great white chunks of buildings’ and ‘garden houses’ of the Porpoise (152, 182). These particulars of Rolfe’s design suggest that Tennant may have modelled it on the work of Le Corbusier, specifically his 1921–1922 plan to modernise parts of central Paris by erecting widely spaced towers surrounded by parks (Passanti 1987: 53). The concept premiered in the Anglophone world with the publication of The City of Tomorrow (1927). The ‘Tower in a Park’ concept enjoyed some popularity in American, European and UK cities until the middle of the twentieth century (Mumford 1995: 17). Le Corbusier’s designs were also informed by soteriological ideas: his work

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contains ‘numerous cryptic allusions to imminent apocalypse followed by potential reclamation’ (Weston 2003: 147). Bramley is perhaps the most idealistic member of the Slum Abolition League. Tennant writes, Foveaux to him was no hill of solid mortared houses. It was something abstract, something continually brightening into dream … He had lost his heart to a dream that had never been anything more at the most a well-drained solidity. Bramley didn’t care. He was busy in his sedate mind picturing the crumbling of the dirty old places below the steps. He saw the grey steps twisting up the cliff beside the towering white houses, above gardens and great sunny buildings that would once more make the name of Foveaux something to respect. It would no longer be: “Foveaux, oh that’s a slum isn’t it?” It would be: “Foveaux—the place where they’re experimenting with those big concrete flats. Most interesting.” (125)

Bramley’s idealism is strong enough to reconceptualise the geography of Foveaux; the dream of urban transformation sees steps twist up to great white houses rather than down to the ‘dirty old places’ of the slums. There are definite parallels between Bramley and Seven Poor Men of Sydney’s Joseph. Both are everymen whose ‘sedate’ minds nevertheless have the power to find expansive possibility in otherwise limited circumstances. Joseph’s ‘ray of sunlight’ passing through ‘the clerestories of superstition’ represent the novel’s hope for modern culture and rational science to replace outdated religious doctrine, thus remaking the city an ‘earthly paradise’ (Stead 2015: 99). Similarly, Bramley’s ‘crumbling of the dirty old places’ and their replacement by ‘towering white houses’ is a vision of urban transformation that comes close to mystic. At the start of Foveaux, inspired by the sermon a preacher delivers to his dying father, Bramley’s younger brother, Tommy, imagines the afterlife as ‘a celestial Lennox Street with little gold balconies hanging out over the blue void of heaven’ (98). This is a mystical reimagining of what Foveaux really is, with its balconies ‘like pouches under the eyes of a dead man’ hanging over ‘what looked like a bottomless pit’ (51, 14). Bramley’s vision is secular, but almost as numinous. It echoes Le Corbusier’s thoughts on his own ‘redeemed’ ‘Radiant City’: The city of light that will dispel the miasmas of anxiety now darkening our lives, that will succeed the twilight of despair we live in at the present, exists on paper. We are only waiting for a ‘yes’. (qtd. Weston 2003: 147)

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Of course, Le Corbusier’s Ville Radieuse was never realised off paper. Bramley too recognises that the Porpoise may not have a life beyond the plan pinned up on Jimmy’s bedroom wall. ‘Even if those great places were built in Plug Alley’, Tennant writes, ‘they would never come up to the fairy glitter of his vision’ (125). Perhaps inevitably, the Slum Abolition League is defeated by Honest John, who pitches the Porpoise to the Council as a ‘potty little idea of building some miserable blocks of workmen’s flats’ (210), before skewing the councillors’ votes by playing on the period’s commitment to provincial insularity: “One of the leading schemers—ha, ha—not using the term in any derogatory sense—is an architect who, I hear, has recently returned from Europe very, very full of these rather—h’rrm—European ideas.” (211)

With their defeat at Council, Jimmy gives up, and ‘with one wrench swept down “The Porpoise” from the wall’ (212). Tennant seems to suggest the plan’s mistake in its name: ‘the Porpoise’ connotes a utopianism that cannot compete with the power of capital and politics. Indeed, despite obviously appreciating their more noble purpose, Tennant employs the same satiric tone she directs at Honest John and Bill Bross to gently mock the Slum Abolition League. She points out how they ‘milk’ ‘fashionable old ladies and rich widows’ for funds and manipulate public opinion with the purple prose of their made-up stories of deprivation in the slums (152). The third scheme for Foveaux’s development is Bill Bross Junior’s plan to erect luxury flats. In the midst of the post-war boom, Bross decides to transform Foveaux into a fashionable locality for middle-class occupants. In Benjamin’s city writings, the middle-class apartment is contrasted with the dynamic city landscape. The apartment of the sort Benjamin lived in as a child in Berlin establishes itself ‘as “timeless”, impervious to changing, socio-economic conditions, as something that will remain “always-the same”’ (Gilloch 1996: 80). Similarly, Bross’s flats are everything that the rest of Foveaux, grey and muddled, is not. They have ‘glass doors’, ‘imitation marble halls’, ‘newly painted letter-boxes’, hot and cold water and private bathrooms (204). However, there is a cost to marketing Foveaux Flats as modern and cosmopolitan. Bross’ firm supplies each apartment with ‘cocktail sets and silver and linen galore’, but every time the ‘fashionable mob’ breaks a glass or stains a tablecloth—which is often—they

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have to be replaced before the flat can be let again (303, 304). This is quite literally the capitalist cycle of instant obsolescence: the new becomes the outdated almost instantaneously. During the Depression, this cycle becomes untenable for the company, and Bross is forced to sell the buildings to his father, the slumlord Bill Bross Senior. Bramley, who did not dispose of his idealism as easily as Jimmy did, hopes that the transition might be an opportunity. He goes to Bross Senior with a plan to transform Foveaux Flats into ‘a semblance of what he and Jimmy had hoped the Porpoise would be’: ‘neat, efficient homes’, ‘let … to people at a reasonable rental’ (304). The slumlord is derisive. He plans to turn the Flats into high-rise tenement housing. He will ‘“stick in some partitions an’ gas grillers an’ so on … rooms and bachelor flats. Ha, Ha. That’s the idea. Modern residential”’ (305). The flats swiftly become a microcosmic, intense representation of the worst of Foveaux: an apartment meant for one family houses three, Bross’s ‘thin partitions’ offer no privacy, and the building develops a reputation for prostitution (312). Unlike wider Foveaux, the flats have no sense of community or ethical attachment to redeem them. Each flat-dweller lives with a ‘self-sufficient suspicion like a hermit in a desert and furious at the people above and below’ (312). In a curious interpenetration of building and people, the flats begin ‘shouting like barrowmen, proclaiming their hard, loud creed of indifference to the universe in general’ (311–12). The building’s devolution from luxury apartments to vertical slum shows the outer limits of greed. Honest John’s plan to sell tracts of resumed slum land for the development of motor garages fails when the Depression hits. His workers at the timber yard go on strike, and suddenly the wave of progress, the crest of which he was so determined to ride to riches, seems just as dangerous to him as it did for the residents of Foveaux: The great wall of water rose until he had to crane his neck to see the curling foam on the crest. It seemed that the foam was a foam of faces— faces he had seen in the mob around the timber-yard—faces of those greasy swine who called themselves “leaders”; faces of the screaming women in his office, hard faces, fierce faces, ravaged faces, alien faces, some of them with slant eyes; and while he stood powerless and sweating, the great grey wave would crash down on him and on Foveaux. (238)

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During the Depression, Honest John is at the mercy of the capitalist system for the first time: the ‘tide of progress’ has turned against him. Now, it is made up of the faces of men and women robbed of employment and housing security by his manoeuvring. The reference to ‘alien faces, some of them with slant eyes’ suggests John’s prejudice (as soon as he realises ‘progress’ is no longer a viable political slogan he switches to preaching the ‘Red Menace’), but it is also one of the few novel’s few allusions to the multiculturalism of Sydney’s slums at the time (143). In the early 1920s, 40 per cent of the houses marked for demolition in Surry Hills were occupied by Chinese residents (Keating 1991: 80). The Council directed that such houses should be the first to go, followed by ‘doubtful tenants’, so that residents ‘classed as good’ could remain in their homes for the longest period of time (Keating 1991: 83). Tennant does not mention this: in Foveaux, the battle for the city is to be waged by and on behalf of its white working class only. Soon after the strike at the timber yard, Hutchison loses his job as Mayor. After years of bribery and kickbacks, the council is accused of grossly mishandling funds, and although Honest John is cleared of all wrongdoing, the council is disbanded. This is less concerning for Hutchison than the strike: even though he loses political power he still has money and property, meaning he can escape the city. Honest John sees out the Depression at his country house in the Blue Mountains, where he makes a profit marketing a freshwater spring as a bath that would make ‘old Roman emperors … go green with envy’ (403). Tennant’s metaphors are not subtle but they make a clear point about the villains, victors and victims of urban modernity and its ‘tide of progress’. Honest John’s sketch of Foveaux on the back of a campaign leaflet, the Porpoise and Foveaux Flats each represent a competing narrative of urban progress. Tennant exposes the limitations of each one: Honest John loses his job and the council is dissolved, the Porpoise ends up crumpled on the floor of one of the tenements the League wanted to demolish, and Foveaux Flats is transformed into a vertical slum. Foveaux as a whole loses its identity, merging with the city of Sydney. The novel shows how each plan fails to provide for the material needs of the city’s people, either through greed, ineptitude or excessive idealism.

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Renewal and Reclamation at 10 Paradise Street In the Arcades Project, Benjamin asserts that ‘the concept of progress must be grounded in the concept of catastrophe’ (1999: 573). In Foveaux, Tennant expresses a similar idea in a single phrase: ‘the rubble of the improvements’ (25). Through images of the demolitions intended to open up land for redevelopment, the narrative links urban ‘progress’ with failure, social regression and the destruction of community. The first demolitions are linked to the carnage of World War I: By the time Lennox Street was gaping into Errol Street in a devastated area of broken houses and torn paving there was a procession streaming the opposite way … it was dull, prosaic, khaki-coloured, and the people watching stood on the ruins of the broken houses, on the rubble of the improvements. (25)

The resumptions, heralded by Honest John as the cresting wave of the inescapable tide of progress, are a catastrophe for the ‘exodus’ of people who must leave their homes (213). Demolishing these houses that hold so much history, Mrs Cornish thinks, is ‘like pulling up tombstones, not proper’ (203). Mr Bishop, the neighbourhood ‘seer’, sneers that the developers ‘wouldn’t care if they built over a cemetery’ (204). Tennant’s imagery associates the demolition of Mrs Webb’s lodging house, that important threshold place of communal existence, with violence and murder: The walls of the old cottages came down stone by stone, the dust blowing out like thick choking smoke that set the lorry drivers and demolishers’ men coughing and swearing. A pile of lumber, tossed at random to wait removal, had massacred the little peach-tree. The lower-floor windows were blinded with sheets of corrugated iron, the upper ones knocked, the roof, ripped off like an Indian scalp, exposed the sore and naked plaster of the dull blue walls which, in their turn, would be more clouds of choking dust, so many more lorry-loads of old rubble. (203)

Here, the homes are figured as bodies under attack. At the beginning of the book, Reverend Doctor Wilbraham warns his congregation against the widening of Lennox Street with allegorical scripture: ‘And he opened the bottomless pit and there arose a smoke out of the pit as of the smoke of a great furnace, and the sun and air were darkened by the smoke of the

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pit’ (71). The statement reads as ironic, but when we recall it alongside Tennant’s description of the demolition, the latter takes on almost apocalyptic meaning. However, unlike Linnie’s desire to see Plug Alley come down as a ‘start’ to something better, the resumed land remains empty and unsold for years. This was also the case in real life: seven and a half acres of cleared land in Surry Hills ‘lay waste for decades, or became the site of temporary businesses operating from makeshift buildings’ (Keating 1991: 83). Bramley reflects on the empty space and its distance from his dream of a modernist future for Foveaux: Where Rolfe’s white towers should have caught the light there were only close-packed chimney tops and dirty backyards. In the distance, where stretched Anne Street, Byswater Lane and Little Torrent Street, bald patches indicated that the council’s policy, grinding slowly but exceedingly small, had munched down an undergrowth of small cottages, much as a sea-cow might demolish part of Rolfe’s well-beloved Sargasso Sea for lunch. For the most part the jagged terraces still presented their duncoloured coral reefs in dirty repetition. Of the two types of desolation, the built and the unbuilt, it seemed to the young man gazing down that the built was less dispiriting. Like a lost silver ring in deep water, his foolish idealism lay below there, not broken, but encrusted and dull, never to be recovered. (214)

The Porpoise’s ‘white towers catching the light’ contrast with wreckage that, contrary to Honest John’s predictions, was not swept away by the tide of progress but multiplied by it. The desolation of the empty land is worse than the desolation of the slums, because at least in the slums there was the possibility of community. In the passage, the sea becomes a river as hope for the future narrows. Bramley’s ‘foolish idealism’ is figured as a ring, suggesting the promises which have been lost, and the broken union between Bram and his city. In Benjamin’s dialectical vision of urban modernity, decay brings opportunities for creation; construction can come from the ruins of destruction. A similar kind of dialectic is at work in Tennant’s depiction of the resumed space. In Foveaux, it does not take long before the people learn to live with the useless land: Over the weed-green ruins of the erstwhile terrace the youth of the neighbourhood had laid out a miniature golf course. The demolition of the

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terrace was most providential as the Foot had no “minny” golf links. Here was a heaven-sent opportunity to indulge in the sport of the moment. With home-made clubs and old balls the Minny Golf Glub gleefully sallied forth on warm evenings. Lovers murmured among the ruins by night; small boys played bushrangers there when they should have been at school; cats sunned themselves on the remaining mounds and dogs sported across the terrain. (213–14)

Bramley’s utopian dreams end in despair, but these humorous images of improvisation and adaptation carry with them the energy of potential reclamation and renewal. The demolition site is porous; in it, the old and new, construction and destruction intermingle and become indistinguishable.8 Following Benjamin’s configuration of porosity, this allows it to become a site of ‘playful (re)construction’ (Gilloch 1996: 88). As Franck and Stevens write in their discussion of ‘loose space’, it is urban inhabitants themselves who must ‘recognise the possibilities … and make use of those possibilities for their own ends, facing the potential risks of doing so’ (2007: 2). Possibility and potential risk are embedded in the title of the novel’s final section, ‘The Rocks’. It takes determination to scramble up onto the rocks from the wild currents of the surf, and one may get hurt in the process, but Tennant ends the novel with hope that there is a place of safety to be found in urban modernity. These are not the barren rocks of Seven Poor Men of Sydney onto which Michael falls as he leaps from the Gap at the exhausted end of the book. In Tennant’s novel, the rocks mean safety, a respite from being tossed in the tide of progress. Earlier in the novel, Linnie and Jimmy reflect bitterly on this tide and the wreckage it leaves behind. For Linnie, the city is ‘just like a surf with the tide rising’ (182). On a balcony looking out over Foveaux, she wonders what would happen ‘if you fell, if your hands slipped off the rock, and you drowned and the pain drowned with you…’ (182). In the same position, Jimmy thinks of all the people ‘being battered into sand for other people to build

8 In ‘One-Way Street’, Benjamin argues that children are ‘irresistibly drawn by the detritus generated by building, gardening, housework, tailoring or carpentry’ (1979: 52– 3). Children, who are less indoctrinated to the capitalist system, can recognise and create meaning from waste in ways adults cannot.

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into useless shapes that would be smashed again … being pounded slowly into smaller disintegrating particles under invisible waves’ (183). During the Depression, both Linnie and Rolfe come close to being lost to these invisible waves. They lose track of each other, with Linnie moving away and changing her name to rid herself of all association with Foveaux. They both end up living in hostels for the homeless, barely managing to support themselves. Jimmy works as a barrowman and serves regular stints in prison for traffic infringements, while Linnie scrubs floors and avoids sexual advances from exploitative bosses. However, at the end of the novel they meet again by coincidence, rekindle their relationship and get married. Representing the possibility of hope, the union of Linnie and Jimmy is an unexpectedly conventional plot in a largely plotless novel. Yet the marriage is less successful as a romance than as an opportunity to show the necessity of community and connection to survive life in urban modernity. As Linnie says, ‘You can strand one person, but two means they’re not stranded, they’re—they’re—content’ (366). The marriage also brings back together the Foveaux community that has dispersed throughout the Depression. Coincidentally, Tommy Cornish arrives in time to serve as witness to their wedding. Mamie Noblett helps them find and furnish a home, the tenancy of which Bramley secures in their name. Here salvation is brought not by utopian promise but through processes of collaboration, adaptation and improvisation. This home, 10 Paradise Street, is one of the slum houses Linnie, Jimmy and Bramley were so determined to pull down. Nevertheless, between the three of them, they manage to turn it into a home, even if it isn’t one of the ‘garden houses’ in the ‘great white towers’ about which the Slum Abolition League dreamed. Linnie scrubs the house, Bramley and Tommy pay to have the electricity put on, and the Noblett family contributes old, unneeded furniture. 10 Paradise Street provides Linnie and Rolfe with the sense of security and autonomy that they lacked. Tennant subtly augments the traditional marriage plot by using it to secure Linnie’s future as a political operative in Foveaux. ‘With him to back her’, Linnie thinks, ‘she would tear Foveaux apart. She was shrewd and strong and she could work. Oh, how she would work!’ (382). In a book populated by the grand schemes of men, it is Linnie— the put-upon carer, occasional writer and one-time urban transient—who manages to inaugurate real positive change. She helps start the Progressive Association, a grassroots organisation that has a membership of several hundred and enjoys much more support than the Communist

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or Labor parties. Just as importantly, Linnie also manages to get rid of the neighbourhood bully, Mrs Metting, whose outlandish acts threaten the network of women so important to Foveaux’s stability. Despite brief membership of the Australian Communist Party, Tennant remained distrustful of ‘systems’ and ‘solutions’ (Spender 1988: 151). In Foveaux, urban renewal and reclamation arise from individual and communal efforts to adapt to and intervene in the city. In this, the book echoes the urbanist discourse of theorists such as Lefebvre and de Certeau, who advocate for the right of the public to the city. As architect and urban theorist Rem Koolhaas concludes his oft-quoted, polemic essay ‘What Ever Happened to Urbanism?’, we need to redefine our relationship with the city, ‘not as its makers but as its mere subjects, as its supporters’ (1995: 971). In different ways, Honest John, Bill Bross Junior and the Slum Abolition League all tried to shape narratives of urban progress by imagining themselves makers of the city. Linnie and Jimmy succeed in achieving some semblance of security by becoming its supporters, and learning to improvise, adapt and collaborate in these roles.

Conclusion Koolhaas argues that urbanism, as an art and a theory, has failed to create an enduring proposition for the modern city. Grand narratives and projects do not understand the diversity of needs in urban modernity and thus cannot successfully negotiate with capital to foster a flexible and adaptive city. ‘We were making sand castles’, he writes. ‘Now we swim in the sea that swept them away’ (1995: 971). Nevertheless, Koolhaas concludes, ‘More than ever, the city is all we have’ (971). At the beginning and end of Foveaux, Tennant reminds readers that there is ‘no rescue ship’ from urban modernity (27, 425). Accordingly, the conclusion of the narrative is about finding ways to live and survive in the city. The book itself is a compromise with its readers. We are given the happy ending of Linnie and Jimmy’s marriage, but the novel continues for another thirty pages, the bulk of which is taken up by journalistic prose recounting the horrors experienced by Kingston, the Child Welfare inspector, who sees the worst of human destitution in the slums. Tennant’s vision of urban modernity is thus produced of both hope and despair, but unlike Seven Poor Men of Sydney, in Foveaux this tension is productive rather

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than exhausting. Tennant’s narrative ends in conciliation rather than capitulation. The last scenes of the novel take place in aqueous spaces that reflect this spirit of conciliation. Through the novel, the open waters of the Harbour and sea carry the possibility of freedom and cleansing. Some of Bram’s ‘best memories’ are of the nights he spent on the on patrol during his wartime naval service, ‘the lap of the water … the harbour like a dark bowl rimmed with fire’ (87). Later, his ‘queer dreams of getting out of Foveaux’ centre on escape to water: if he could live ‘somewhere along the harbour or the sea front, he would die happy’ (313). As it is for Dark, the beach for Tennant is non-utilitarian, open space, unaffected by the blight of urban poverty. It is the antithesis of the city’s built spaces that Bram feels ‘closing round him like an invisible, mysterious jail’ (314).9 However, by the end of the narrative and in his mid-thirties, Bramley has resigned himself to life in Foveaux and the small joys it brings. In this context, he visits the liminal spaces of the ocean-pools and Waverley Cemetery. In the famous cliff-top graveyard, the dead look out over the gloriously blue Pacific Ocean. We can read this as analogous with the novel’s attempt to remember and honour suffering while gesturing towards hope for the future. Likewise at the pools, halfway between the city and the sea, Bram experiences a kind of renewal: He had been grimed with bitterness all the week. Bitterness against things he was powerless to alter. All that had dissolved in salt water. The ache, the futility of his life washed off him, the wasted years doing work that did not count when he knew he had the ability for better things. That was what hurt. He had not wanted happiness, but he had wanted to work hard at a worthwhile job. He had not had that chance. It was no use being bitter. It was his own fault for not being hard enough to push people out of his way. That would have brought one sort of happiness, but this was another perhaps more to be desired. (419)

In this mood of bracing acquiescence, Bramley can express his love for the place as it is, despite his failure to transform it into something better. His ‘dream’ of ‘towering white houses, above gardens and great sunny

9 The same kind of dialectic informed the slogan of the Parisian revolutionaries of 1968, ‘sous les pavés: la plage!’ which literally translates to ‘under the pavement: the beach’.

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buildings’ is replaced by love for its ‘funny little squares’, ‘houses nearly a hundred years old’ and people living lives of ‘bravery and horrible patience’ (422). And despite the fact he did not achieve the dream, perhaps he has left himself a memorial ‘in the dirty bit of resumed land that the city did not yet know how to use’ (423). At least in that empty, loose space there is the potential for what Koolhaas calls ‘the staging of uncertainty’ (1995: 971) or for Benjamin’s ‘new, unforeseen constellations’, where meaning can be made by rearranging what already exists (1979: 169). We can also read the novel itself as a memorial to the possibility of other and multiple conceptions of the city. Tennant uses the symbolic geography of Foveaux to question competing narratives of urban progress and expose the limited way in which each one accounts for the material needs of the city’s inhabitants. In doing so, she highlights how these inhabitants intervene in and transform their city by exploiting opportunities for improvisation, adaptation and collaboration. Reflecting these processes formally, the novel itself stands as an alternative narrative of urban modernity.

Works Cited Attard, Karen. “Nomadology in Kylie Tennant’s The Battlers.” In Land and Identity: Proceedings of the 1997 conference held at the University of New England Armidale New South Wales 27–30 September 1997 , edited by Michael Deves and Jennifer A. McDonnell, 94–98. Sydney: Association for the Study of Australian Literature, 1998. Auchterlonie, Dorothy. “The Novels of Kylie Tennant.” Meanjin 12, no. 4 (1953): 395–403. Benjamin, Andrew. “Porosity at the Edge: Working Through Walter Benjamin’s ‘Naples’.” Architectural Theory Review 10, no. 1 (2007): 33–43. Benjamin, Walter. The Arcades Project. Translated by Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin. The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1999. ———. One-Way Street and Other Writings. Translated by Edmund Jephcott and Kingsley Shorter. London: NLB, 1979. Benjamin, Walter and Asja L¯acis. “Naples.” In One-Way Street and Other Writings, by Walter Benjamin, translated by Edmund Jephcott and Kingsley Shorter, 167–176. London: NLB, 1979. Berman, Jessica. Modernist Commitments: Ethics, Politics, and Transnational Modernism. New York: Columbia UP, 2011.

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Bluemel, Kristin. “What Is Intermodernism?” In Intermodernism: Literary Culture in Mid-Twentieth Century Britain, edited by Kristin Bluemel, 1–18. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2009. Boyd Whyte, Iain. “Introduction.” In Modernism and the Spirit of the City, edited by Iain Boyd Whyte, 1–32. London: Routledge, 2003. Buck-Morss, Susan. The Dialectics of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1991. Caira, Diana. “Kylie Tennant’s Ear for the People’s Voices.” Australian Folklore: A Yearly Journal of Folklore Studies 9 (1994): 146–150. City of Sydney Archives. NSCA CRS 51, Demolition Books, 1900–1949. Dick, Margaret. The Novels of Kylie Tennant. Adelaide: Rigby, 1996. Doyle, Sue. “Doomed Streets of Sydney 1900–1928: Images from the City Council’s Demolition Books.” Scan 2, no. 2 (2005). http://scan.net.au/ scan/journal/display.php?journal_id=64. Edquist, Harriet. “Reading Modernity: Architecture and Urbanism in the Interwar Australian Novel.” Fabrications: JSAHANZ 18, no. 2 (2008): 50–69. Franck, Karen A. and Quentin Stevens. “Tying Down Loose Space.” In Loose Space: Possibility and Diversity in Urban Life, edited by Karen A. Franck and Quentin Stevens, 1–33. London: Routledge, 2007. Freestone, Robert. “The Great Lever of Social Reform: The Garden Suburb 1900–30.” In Sydney: City of Suburbs, edited by Max Kelly, 53–76. Randwick: New South Wales University Press, 1987. ———. “An Historical Perspective.” In Planning Australia: An Overview of Urban and Regional Planning, edited by Susan Thompson and Paul Magnin, 73–97. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012. Gilloch, Graeme. Myth and Metropolis: Walter Benjamin and the City. Malden: Blackwell, 1996. Grant, Jane. Kylie Tennant: A life. Canberra: National Library of Australia, 2006. Gruber, Helmut. Red Vienna: Experiment in Working-Class Culture 1919–1934. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1991. Inglis Moore, T. “The Tragi-Comedies of Kylie Tennant.” Southerly 18, no. 1 (1957): 2–8. Keating, Christopher. Surry Hills: The City’s Backyard. Sydney: Hale & Iremonger, 1991. Koolhaas, Rem. “What Ever Happened to Urbanism?” In S, M, L, XL, OMA, edited by Rem Koolhaas and Bruce Mau, 959–971. New York: The Monicelli Press, 1995. Matthews, Brian. “‘A Kind of Semi-Sociological Literary Criticism’: George Orwell, Kylie Tennant and Others.” Westerly, no. 2 (1981): 65–70. Mellor, Leo. Reading the Ruins: Modernism, Bombsites and British Culture. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2011.

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Mumford, Eric. “The ‘Tower in a Park’ in America: Theory and Practice, 1920– 1960.” Planning Perspectives 10, no. 1 (1995): 17–41. Passanti, Francesco. “The Skyscrapers of the Ville Contemporaine.” Assemblage 4 (1987): 52–65. Reps, John. Canberra 1912: Plans and Planners of the Australian Capital Competition. Carlton: Melbourne UP, 1997. Rifkind, Candida. The Novel and Documentary Modernism. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 2009. Rodd, L.C. A Gentle Shipwreck. Sydney: Nelson, 1975. Ryan, Anna. Where Land Meets Sea: Coastal Explorations of Landscape, Representation and Spatial Experience. Farnham: Ashgate Publishing, 2012. Spender, Dale. “Afterword: In praise of Kylie Tennant.” In The Peaceful Army, edited by Flora Eldershaw, 149–156. Ringwood: Penguin, 1988. Stavrides, Stavros. “Heterotopias and the Experience of Porous Urban Space.” In Loose Space: Possibility and Diversity in Urban Life, edited by Karen Franck and Quentin Stevens, 174–192. London: Routledge, 2007. Stead, Christina. Seven Poor Men of Sydney. Carlton: Melbourne UP, 2015. Stevens, Quentin. The Ludic City: Exploring the Potential of Public Spaces. London: Routledge, 2007. Strang, Veronica. “Common Senses: Water, Sensory Experience and the Generation of Meaning.” Journal of Material Culture 10, no. 1 (2005): 92–120. ———. Water: Nature and Culture. London: Reaktion Books, 2015. Swyngedouw, Erik. “Scaled Geographies: Nature, Place, and the Politics of Scale.” In Scale and Geographic Inquiry: Nature, Society, and Method, edited by Eric Sheppard and Robert B. McMaster, 129–53. Malden: Blackwell, 2004. Tennant, Kylie. “Pioneering Still Goes On.” In The Peaceful Army, edited by Flora Eldershaw, 141–148. Ringwood: Penguin, 1988. ———. Foveaux. Adelaide: Michael Walmer, 2014. Weston, Dagmar Motycka. “The Lantern and the Glass: On the Themes of Renewal and Dwelling in Le Corbusier’s Purist Art and Architecture.” In Modernism and the Spirit of the City, edited by Iain Boyd Whyte, 146–177. London: Routledge, 2003. Wotherpoon, Garry and Chris Keating. “Surry Hills.” In The Dictionary of Sydney, 2009. https://dictionaryofsydney.org/entry/surry_hills.

CHAPTER 6

The End of the City: M. Barnard Eldershaw’s Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow (1947; 1983)

There are, there must be, a few things worth saving. I don’t really know what they are, I can only postulate them, but several human beings, a few pictures, perhaps a torn sheet of paper here and there, with a few verses written on them, a letter, a bowl …. Things on which life has left its fingerprints. … If the city were bombed no one would think of saving the valuable things. All the wrong things would be saved. M. Barnard Eldershaw, Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow (1983: 284)

The past carries with it a temporal index by which it is referred to redemption. There is a secret agreement between past generations and the present one. Our coming was expected on earth. Like every generation that preceded us, we have been endowed with a weak Messianic power, a power to which the past has a claim. That claim cannot be settled cheaply. Walter Benjamin, Illuminations (2007: 254)

M. Barnard Eldershaw’s final novel is centred not on water, but on its absence. Theirs is a Sydney in drought, and it suffers from punishing heat, dust and smoke:

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 M. Brayshaw, Sydney and Its Waterway in Australian Literary Modernism, Literary Urban Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-64426-0_6

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A thick sky and a coppery sun. The thermometer in the colonnade of the post-office mounting steadily in the heavy hours of the afternoon. Smell of smoke in the city streets, blowing in from bushfires in the west. Tang of burning gum leaves, reminding the people that this was a frontier city. Not a mechanism whirring by and for itself, but the outpost of a great hinterland from which it drew its life. (1983: 161)

Delayed by wartime paper shortages and a tussle with the censor, the novel was published as Tomorrow and Tomorrow in 1947, then re-released in ‘uncensored’ form by Virago in 1983. Written between 1940 and 1944, the book’s composition is roughly contemporaneous with what is now considered one of Australia’s three worst dry periods. Lasting from 1937 to 1945, the World War II drought killed millions of livestock, dried out Sydney’s Nepean Dam and nearly crippled wheat production. In January 1939, an extreme heatwave killed Sydneysiders on the streets of the city, while devastating fires in Victoria claimed seventy-one lives, destroyed entire townships and ruined two million hectares of arable land (Gergis 2018). In Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow war rages in Europe and the Pacific, but mercury edging up in the thermometer is an existential threat almost as dangerous. The novel’s mounting sense of crisis and eventual catastrophe correspond with an aesthetic register derived from heat, dust and fire. How then does the book fit within this study of Sydney, its waterway and the modern novel? If I have argued for the especial role of the waterway in enabling Australian literary modernism, why conclude with a novel that is distinctly non-aqueous? In Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow, Barnard Eldershaw confront drought, fire, war, invasion, aerial bombardment, censorship, propaganda and public apathy. This is an onslaught likely to result in the death of the city, literature and civilisation itself. In a book that attempts to signify circumstances that seems beyond signification—a Sydney novel about the end of Sydney—of course there will be no water. Marjorie Barnard and Flora Eldershaw’s first collaborative work of fiction, A House is Built (1929), tells the story of the development of Sydney from the early nineteenth century as an intergenerational family saga. The novel’s careful structure and linear plot confer a degree of inevitability onto events as the burgeoning colony becomes a city. Their final novel could have been called The House Torn Down, so radically different is its approach to narrative form, history and urban modernity.

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The book is structured by two intertwined narratives. The frame takes place in the twenty-fourth century, in an agrarian socialist ‘scientific state’ that occupies the continent once known as Australia. The writer Knarf has just completed his work of historical fiction, Little World Left Behind, which tracks Sydney from its brief heyday in the twenties, through the Depression, the war and its spectacular end, when its own citizens burn it to the ground at some point in the late 1940s. Knarf reads the novel to his friend Ord, an archaeologist, over the course of an afternoon, and Barnard Eldershaw move between the two narratives frequently and without abiding by an obvious structuring principle. Knarf interrupts his reading frequently to debate with Ord the merits of fiction and history, apologise for his literary failings and make links to his own time—which has sorted the environmental problems that beset ‘old Australia’ but only at the cost of individual liberty. This ‘metafictive strategy’ draws attention to the novel’s status as a novel; Barnard Eldershaw’s critical gaze is directed not only at the city but also at the novel form as well (Lamond 2005: 122). Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow can be located within what E.M. Forster called at the time the ‘1939 State’, when fear of global war and widespread aerial bombardment were rampant (qtd. Ellis 2015: 1). Air warfare would destroy cities, and the destruction of cities would inevitably lead to the total collapse of civilisation (Ellis 2015: 1). In January 1939, Barnard Eldershaw wrote an unpublished pacifist manifesto entitled ‘Liberty and Violence’ that pre-empted the concerns of their later novel. In it, they echo the fears of their UK counterparts: We know that another war will only differ from its predecessors in being more terrible in its incidence and more universal in its application. War has enlarged its boundaries. In future there will be no non-combatants. (1995: 251)

Through the thirties, a considerable body of Anglo-European speculative fiction drew on this sense of impending crisis for titillating spectacle, grim warning, impetus for political treatises or a combination of all three. This apocalyptic turn was widespread enough to inspire new generic terms, including the German Weltuntergangsroman, or ‘World’s-end novel’ (Saint-Amour 2015: 137). H.G Wells, probably the genre’s most famous proponent, used the term ‘fantasias of possibility’, in which the writer took ‘some developing possibility in human affairs and … develop[ed] the

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broad consequences of that possibility’ (qtd. in Saint-Amour 2015: 137). Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow is perhaps the only Australian example of this genre. Barnard and Eldershaw were well-placed to write the death of Sydney: their considerable body of literary and historical work—the latter of which I have drawn on throughout this book—shows their strong investment in the city as a place, idea and synecdoche for settler modernity more broadly. In the 1930s and early 1940s, both were left-leaning leaders in literary society, hosting a ‘salon’ in Kings Cross, where they promoted a ‘heavily politicised agenda for Sydney writers’ (Dever 1991). Upon the outbreak of war, they protested censorship and the curtailing of other freedoms with the introduction of National Security legislation. ‘I do agree with you that the secondary consequences of the war are even worse than the war itself, horrible and tragic through it is’, Barnard wrote to Eleanor Dark in June 1940 (qtd. in Ferrier 1992: 57). In the novel, Sydney’s pattern of devolution maps onto the final three stages of Lewis Mumford’s schema of urban rise and fall in The Culture of Cities (1938). Knarf’s novel begins in 1924, with Sydney as ‘megalopolis’, the ‘city under the influence of a capitalistic mythos’ (1970: 289). In the Depression and with war looming, it becomes the ‘tyrannapolis’ (290). Finally, as society breaks down, Sydney is the ‘Nekropolis’, ‘a tomb for dying’ (291). In Knarf’s novel, time ticks towards this inevitable destruction. In its opening scene, seconds drop ‘like invisible, abrasive sand’ from the ‘big clock’ at Central Station that ‘hung as impersonal as a moon from the domed roof’ (45). ‘There were those who saw the end coming and cried their warnings, but helplessly’, Barnard Eldershaw write. ‘When a man is caught in a conveyor belt he is not saved by realising his danger’ (11). The danger, as they see it, is war and drought. Both are forms of violence with causes rooted in what they call the ‘financial structure of civilization’ (1995: 253). This is made clear when characters share their fears for the future. ‘It’s not wars that will get us in the end’, says one (174). ‘It’s the long-range factors … Soil erosion and the desiccation of the country, the march of the desert’. Another agrees: ‘It all hangs together, doesn’t it? Competition makes greed, greed strips the country and won’t wait to rehabilitate it. War is competition raised to the nth’ (174). Australia was spared the devastation wrought upon Europe during the war, but Barnard Eldershaw draw upon the bombing of Darwin in February 1942 and the Japanese submarine attack on Sydney three

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months later to imagine aerial bombardment, subsequent social fragmentation through polarised politics, and Sydney’s self-immolation under threat of invasion from a post-war Imperial alliance of the UK, US and Japan. Citizens’ ‘passive, unregistered disappointment’, conditioned by the ‘myth’ of consumer capitalism, turns to rage after the years of Depression and war, which they unleash against the city as ‘symbol of greed and profit’ (45, 384). While images from London during the Blitz must have contributed to Barnard Eldershaw’s descriptions of city streets blown apart, colonial monuments falling to flames and the slums as rubble, just twelve months earlier they had witnessed widespread destruction much closer to home. Through January 1939, Sydney newspapers carried photographs from the Victorian fires—of burnt out cars, flames consuming buildings, flattened streets and dirty, wide-eyed ‘refugees’ who escaped death by hiding in ‘dugouts’ or diving into dams. The papers quoted eyewitnesses to the ‘colossal damage’ and ‘utter desolation’, describing the fires as ‘Australia’s greatest Holocaust’, and a ‘calamity’ for the whole nation.1 Reading through these articles now, it is impossible to ignore their similarity with the language and imagery of the upcoming war. Interestingly, H.G. Wells was in Australia at the time to address a science congress, and he accompanied the Governor-General to fire-devastated regions (Haynes 1990: 336). When he wrote of the experience later, he made the connection to aerial bombardment: The idea of a systematic incendiary attack upon bush and forest in hot weather naturally occurred to us. As a supplement to the bombing of towns … it is obviously full of grim possibilities not only for Australia but for any other well-wooded country. (Travels 49–50, qtd. in Haynes 1990: 354)

In Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow, it is not war that assures final apocalypse, but drought. After the destruction of the city, those that survive flee to the bush, but they find it no more hospitable than the fiery rubble they left behind: ‘The waterholes dried up. The sheep died in hundreds and then thousands. Dumb and helpless death was everywhere’ (6–7). Knarf imagines that last generation as ‘a people who had

1 These details are drawn from search of the Trove database of Sydney newspapers. Citations for quotations are as follows: Sun (1939), January 15, 1; Beckingsale (1939), January 21, 3; Australasian (1939), January 21, 3.

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ravaged the country, left it denuded and helpless and then had gone out, irrationally and obstinately, to die with the country’ (8). The novel’s dual narrative structure produces dual versions of the city. Readers first experience Sydney as a field of rubble, as Knarf recounts the trip he took with Ord to see the ruins of the ‘great city’ on the coast (14). Little World Left Behind has its origins there among the ‘elegiac debris’, ‘more stimulating to the imagination because so naïve’ (16, 22). When we encounter the Sydney of 1924 in Knarf’s novel just pages later, our impression of it is shaped by knowledge of its future ruin. Barnard Eldershaw frequently intersplice the frame narrative with Knarf’s novel, meaning that readers experience both versions of Sydney simultaneously. The ‘city of steel and concrete, of polished and impervious bankfronts, of packed concrete roads and everlasting pavements, mechanic, mechanised, controlled, product of reason and science’ is, at the same time, a ruin (90). Knarf describes the ‘great artery’ of the city, William Street, that dips down through Kings Cross and up into the city. In 1925, it is a ‘thunder of light and movement’: Building went ahead furiously. The skyline of the city was changing. From the hill of William Street the horizon bristled with cranes. Taxis multiplied. (82)

This is ‘progress [as] a road running straight and fair into infinity’ (82). Four hundred years later, Knarf and Ord visit the same site: There was rubbish in the grass, ridges faintly discernible still, where the streets had run, blocks of stone with tooling on them, fragments of slate and tile, rust-eaten fragments of iron worked to some almost obliterated antique pattern. It was too stony, too encumbered to be fertile, yet none of that detritus was of any value or any interest. It had the melancholy of places once living, now dead, laid waste, without dignity. (134–35)

Slate, tile and ironwork were the building materials of houses built during the Victorian period, when Sydney was dominated by what Barnard calls ‘the well-to-do and worthy citizens’, who built a city with ‘no concessions to geography or climate. … They got their money’s worth in mass and ornament’ (1947: 22). Four centuries later, Barnard Eldershaw imagine this version of the city, and the aspirations of its monied class, reduced to useless detritus. They highlight its environmental cost, as Knarf notes

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that ‘the bush had not come back willingly’ to the site (135). ‘The hill had had to be trenched and eucalypts planted to take away the appearance of a waste land, even of a rubbish heap’ (135). This is what ‘the road of progress’ really is, in the now-time of the novel. This is modernity as a ‘petrified, primal landscape’ (Benjamin 2019: 174). In Benjamin’s famous Thesis IX, Paul Klee’s Angelus Novus becomes the Angel of History, who turns away from the future and to the past. The Angel sees there not a ‘chain of events’ but ‘one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet’ (2007: 257). The Angel would like to stay, to bear witness to the dead and the suffering, but there is a storm called progress and it ‘irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward’ (2007: 258). Benjamin’s aim in his work is to find among the wreckage the means of halting the catastrophe, to ‘brush history against the grain’ and seize hold of moments that allow for critical, dialectical engagement with a past capable of interrupting the phantasmagoria of commodity capitalism and the myth of historicism (2007: 257). Similarly, by destroying and then reanimating Sydney, Barnard Eldershaw aim to salvage that which the road of progress runs over, to collect the ‘dust in history’ as all that remains of what has been lost to the totalising forces of war, capitalism and environmental degradation (82). In his book Tense Future: Modernism, Total War, Encyclopedic Form, Paul K. Saint-Amour examines a collection of interwar writing into which Tomorrow would fit comfortably, showing how these otherwise diverse works are united by their writers’ dissent from ‘baleful totalities’ of globalisation, capitalism and total war (2015: 10). Saint-Amour identifies two forms this dissent takes: one method opposes the totalising force with ‘some more defensible counter-totality (altermondialisme, communism, and perpetual peace)’ (10). The other ‘opposes bad totalities through the partial, the local, the fragmentary’ (10). Saint-Amour views the two approaches ‘not as discrete alternatives but as plaited into one another, dialectically enmeshed’ (10). He points towards examples of what he terms ‘encyclopedic modernism’, work that ‘sought to archive a city, national culture, historical moment, or worldview against the eventuality of its erasure [through total war]’ (182). Yet writers of encyclopedic modernism understood that their ‘project of synoptic representation’ is at once ‘necessary and impossible’: necessary because the discourse of total war must be resisted, and impossible because ‘any putatively total view’ must always be partial (185–86).

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I want to locate Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow within this framework of partiality and impossible totalisation. The novel’s urge towards synopsis and diagnosis is clear, but the impulse is routinely undermined by reflexive introspection about writers and the novel form, and by the stylistic and structural inconsistencies brought on by the book’s impossible aspirations. There is little doubt that Barnard Eldershaw intended Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow to be fictional authorisation of a distinct set of political beliefs, including pacificism over violence, socialist democracy over capitalism, and liberty over totalitarianism on either side of the ideological divide. Through their career, they used their fiction, criticism and historical writing to interpret and consolidate Australian society as they understood it. This impulse is embodied by Knarf, who imagines himself standing atop ‘the watchtower of time’, diagnosing from on high the various maladies of the twentieth century (12). In this regard, Barnard Eldershaw keep company with writers George Orwell called the ‘“progressives”, the yea-sayers, the Shaw-Wells type, always leaping forward to embrace the ego-projections which they mistake for the future’ (1968: 520). Yet, Barnard Eldershaw’s long, complicated novel is also shaped by other forces—some intended and other accidental but no less significant— that destabilise the ‘ego-projection’. Mistrust and mockery of grand narratives is built into the novel. One scene imagines a dialogue with God, in his ‘reassuringly normal and commonplace’ office (169). At first, he appears ‘obviously an Englishman, in fact, [He] resembled Mr. H.G. Wells’ (169). Then, God takes on the look of ‘Bernard Shaw’. Finally, God’s petitioner realises that the Almighty ‘was, after all, the image of Winston Churchill, but he had a Hitler moustache’ (169). This is broad satire directed towards men willing to accept war and violence as a necessary means to a utopian future of any political persuasion. Wells and Shaw were committed to ideas of socialist world governments, but their work after the Great War accepted and often imagined widespread destruction as the unavoidable impetus to social evolution. Barnard Eldershaw offer a definition of the novel that minimises its consolidating force and instead suggests a more protean logic. The novel, Ord says, was the typical form of the [twentieth century]; large, rich, confused, intricate, it needs an elastic, free, inclusive form. Strange how form sculptures to period, have you noticed? … Those times were efflorescent, these are

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astringent; we use the more deeply channelled and succinct forms. Writers to-day seem intent on imparting a sense of definition, of something still and completed. The novel is the organ of becoming, the voice of a world in flux. (79–80)

Standing by his own understanding of the novel’s purpose, Ord criticises Knarf when he falls too deeply into the role of an all-powerful literary conjurer. Noting that his friend ‘had been speaking into the air like a bard retelling some saga deeply patterned in his mind’, Ord thinks wryly that is seems as if Knarf believes ‘he had created the world and invented history’ (373). Knarf is a fallible novelist and a fallible prophet. Struggling with its physical and symbolic weight, he fails to read his magnum opus in its entirety. As a result, Barnard Eldershaw’s book suffers from a sometimes inchoate structure, made worse by damage done by the wartime censors and, in the 1983 edition, Virago’s commendable but imperfect restoration. In some ways, then, the novel is doubled like the city. It is phantasmagoria, a form that can ‘contain … and order an uncontrollable excess of ideologies’ (Carter 2013: 180), and it is ruin, bearing witness to but ultimately unable to reconcile the mess of modernity.

Ruin and Phantasmagoria Inspired by ruin, Knarf’s novel begins with the phantasmagoria. It is November 1924 and late-night shoppers move through Central Station as a ‘hunting pack’, ‘drugged, enchanted, eager … with febrile, stunted imaginations’ (46). The city of mass consumerism is described with encyclopaedic intensity: Bright shop windows, endless wish fulfilment, emblems of paradisiacal, unattainable living—model rooms in machine-made taste; eternal sylphs of papier-mâché arrayed in Fashion’s dictates for spring, brides who will never go to bed with their waxen bridegrooms, wooden legs that will never lose their line in stockings that will never ladder, lingerie for a harem with no afterthought of the washtub; food voluptuous and ornate beyond the compass of any stomach; mumbo jumbo of perfumery, secrets of eternal youth and fadeless beauty at bargain prices; no promise too large or improbable, the constant titillation of every gambling impulse, bargains, lay-bys, hire purchase, everything under glass, men and women divided from the millennium only by a price ticket; trade far beyond commodities, seeing hope and love and faith, battening on the living, tender substance

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of humanity and, unexpected retaliation, humanity feeding on this display as on a new pasture, satisfying eye and imagination for nothing, taking the bait and leaving the hook. … These are not real things the people are buying, they are tokens … it is a ritual, an orgy … It is a mystical sharing in the world’s plenty, because there is no sharing. Its banality brings it within everyone’s reach, its blatancy lifts it into the realms of religion, of mysticism. It is vastly, impressively unreasonable. The people do little that is reasonable. (46–47)

The language here echoes almost exactly Marx’s description of commodity fetishism as the relation between human and product elevated into the ‘misty realm of religion’ (Marx 1990: 165). Sydney is a phantasmagorical world of shop windows, display cases and model rooms, built upon the ‘enthronement of the commodity and the glittery of distraction’ (Benjamin 2006: 36). Objects are ‘not real things’ but spectacles, mythological forms, ‘eternal sylphs of papier-mâché’. They are wish images promising but never granting wealth, youth and love. In this dream world of unfulfilled desire and misplaced erotic energy, ‘brides who will never go to bed with their waxen bridegrooms’ are displayed alongside ‘food voluptuous and ornate beyond the compass of any stomach’. Humans feed ‘with unattached fishlike appetites’ on the spectacle, ‘illegible and insignificant’ in a crowd that moves as a ‘sluggish tide … without pattern or direction’ (45). Benjamin’s witnessing of similar sights in the Paris arcades—‘petrified coiffures’ in the windows of hairdressers, crumbling papier-mâché souvenirs and bibelots that ‘take on a hideous aspect’—inspired his dialectical view of modernity (1999: 872). The fashionable commodity is premised on its own obsolescence: fashion is not fashion without a use-by date; the fetish will always become a fossil. Benjamin writes: Everything new … turns out to be a reality that has always been present; and this newness will be as little capable of furnishing it with a liberating solution as a new fashion is capable of rejuvenating society. (1999: 15)

Lulled into the ‘dream-sleep’ of capitalism, people remain ignorant of their oppression. In the phantasmagoria of mass consumerism, ‘humanity figures … as the damned’ (1999: 15). In this way, it is significant that Barnard Eldershaw locate their description of Sydney as dreamworld at Central Station. As historians of the city they would have known that the

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station sits upon the site of the Devonshire Street cemetery, where generations of Sydney residents—including many victims of what was a violent, sometimes lawless colony—were buried until 1867.2 Some, but not all of the bodies were exhumed before work commenced on the station. Above ground, time presses forward; below, time stands still in death. As Christine Buci-Glucksmann writes: the historical time of modernity remains profoundly antinomic: time of progress and time of destruction, time of a dialectic in movement issuing from the Enlightenment and time of a frozen ‘baroque’ dialectic gripped by corpse-like rigidity. (168)

In Barnard Eldershaw’s narration of it, Sydney as dreamworld is also destabilised by the region’s unpredictable climate. The first line of Knarf’s novel notes that ‘the year was precociously hot, the air heavy and tired, as if it were the end and not the beginning of summer’ (44). Summer’s early arrival disturbs the seasons as one of the systems meant to order human movement through history. As the narrative progresses, Barnard Eldershaw foreshadow Sydney’s eventual fiery end with heat that grows increasingly intolerable. Shops try and fail to keep their customers sequestered from the sweltering weather outside, which makes it harder to move and thus harder to shop. Inside the city’s big department store, a ‘corporate vision of wealth and plenty’, ‘Xanadu with a price ticket’, the cooling plant could not cope with the heat of many bodies. The glass of the showcases was warm to the touch from the display of lights. The air was thick with scents and dusts and human exhalations. (148)

Read in the context of the novel’s figuration of drought as apocalypse, untimely and oppressive heat is a destructive force, held in antinomic relation with the time of progress. From Central Station the narrative follows Ally Munster, housewife from the outer suburbs and representative of the ‘drugged’ mass and its 2 In 2019 the State Library of New South Wales hosted an exhibition about the Devonshire Street cemetery and its resumption for the building of Central Station. The exhibition’s accompanying podcast The Burial Files explores some of the more tragic, historically significant and salacious stories of people buried at the cemetery. See State Library of NSW (2019).

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‘passive, unregistered disappointment’ (45). Dragging her toddler son, Ally laments that ‘a day in town—the sort of thing she dreamed about’ had turned out ‘awful’ (46). For Ally, Sydney is ‘the dream, the phantasmagoria, the only reality with which the poverty of her mind could clothe her need’ (46). Yet ‘the promised land was a mirage, she had been shown the delights and told roughly, “None of this is for you”’ (46). When Ally boards a train out of the city, the journey is coloured by allusions to violence and death. While Stead, Cusack, Dark and Tennant register Sydney as an estuarine environment and describe the city in relation to its water, Barnard Eldershaw provide a summative portrait of slums, slaughter-yards and suburbs from within a hot and crowded train carriage. As Barnard writes in Sydney: The Story of a City, ‘travellers coming in by train though the slums and railway marshalling yards see Sydney at her worst’ (1956: 79). The train passes by the railway yards at Redfern as ‘disjointed nightmare of black and silver’, with ‘grimed sheds’, ‘embankments of cinders’, ‘unlit trains like dead leviathans’ and ‘watering equipment as sinister as gallows’ (51). The slaughter-yards at Flemington suggest industrial barbarism, as the ‘smell of hides and animal and cattle trucks crowded with suffering beasts … came into the carriage like a blast’ (52). Lastly, the train passes Rookwood Cemetery, ‘the great burying ground of the city’, with ‘acre upon acre sown with stones, so that as far as the eye could see they rose like unwholesome grey bristles out of the ground’ (53). Mumford notes that the modern city pushes slaughterhouse and cemetery away and hides them from sight (1970: 253). For him, this is symptomatic of the city’s broader displacement of nature: ‘the whole routine divorces itself more completely from the soil, from the visible presence of life and growth and decay, birth and death’ (253). This separation leaves the city’s residents in a ‘mangled state’, divorced from their own natures, ‘handicapped as lovers and as parents by the routine of the metropolis’ (258). Barnard Eldershaw make a similar connection. Squeezed into the overfull, too-hot compartment on the train and disappointed by her unfulfilling day in town, Ally suddenly lashes out at her infant son, beating him about the legs. Though ‘a shock of horror [runs] through the compartment’, nobody intervenes to stop the violence (55). The carriage’s other occupants ‘were ashamed. The same should have belonged to the woman only, but it did not. They all felt it’ (55). Whereas Benjamin suggests that it is possible to redeem the commodity as wish image—to rescue the genuine hope for a better future embedded in it and use it for revolutionary ends (1979: 227), in Barnard Eldershaw’s

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novel, the unrequited desire of commodity capitalism explodes as pointless, shocking violence—first here on the train from Ally towards her baby, and finally in the citizens who turn on their city and burn it to the ground. In the first decades of the twentieth century, capitalist consumerism was ‘increasingly perceived as an explicitly feminine activity’ (Dalziell 2007: 773). In Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow, women are figured as the primary collaborators with the phantasmagoria of urban modernity; however, the novel provides little to no interrogation of the economic structures that determine this relationship. The limitations of Barnard Eldershaw’s depiction of women in capitalism are usefully represented by the story of Elsie Todd. In her first appearance, Elsie is a shop-girl at Ramsay’s department store, but for reasons not narrated she becomes a prostitute—the living body made commodity.3 Elsie reappears briefly in the later years of Depression, after a lottery win sees her become ‘an identity of the Cross by her fantastic fickle generosity’ (358).4 Here, the character seemingly represents both commodity and consumer; she is a ‘public woman’ in two senses—as a prostitute and, through her generosity, a woman ‘for’ the public (Wilson 2001: 74). Elsie represents the metropolis not as the ‘mechanic, mechanised, controlled, product of reason and science’, but its underbelly, the city that is ‘lavish, brilliant, vainglorious, and so thinly laid over shabby ugliness’ (90, 407). In this capacity, during Sydney’s VE Day celebrations, Elsie is adopted as ‘mascot’ of the ‘mob’ (358). She is carried through the streets of Kings Cross on the revellers’ shoulders, until they become bored with her and ‘dump’ her in a doorway, where she dies ‘at an undetermined moment before the street cleaners came in the dismal soberness of a new day’ (358). The novel allows little critical distance from the association made between the ageing prostitute dumped like rubbish to die in Kings Cross, and the rubble of William Street that represents the city’s future ruin. It is tempting to want to reclaim Barnard Eldershaw’s depiction of women for feminism by arguing that their critique is aimed not at women but at the system that ensures their victimisation. It is impossible to do so—the women in Knarf’s post-capitalist society are painted with the 3 See Benjamin 1999: 345, 861. 4 Barnard Eldershaw were most likely inspired by Sydney identity Tilly Divine (1900–

1970), whose involvement in prostitution, razor gangs and prohibited alcohol during the city’s violent interwar period made her infamous. In her later years, she became known for random acts of generosity.

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same black brush (Moore 1996: 257–58). Rather, for Barnard Eldershaw modernity’s main victim, the figure most in need of liberation from the forces of history, is the ‘Everyman’: men as farmers, workers and soldiers (82).5 Harry Munster, Ally’s husband, is the novel’s tragic protagonist and its representative Everyman. Barnard Eldershaw are upfront about Harry’s emblematic role: he is ‘the straw that shows how the tide flows [but] has no influence on the tide’ (82). ‘He does not matter’, Ord thinks, ‘but if he does not matter, nothing matters’ (82). Harry is a veteran of the Great War and a farmer trying to eke out an existence on a soldier settlement in the then-rural Toongabbie. He moves to the city only at his wife’s insistence, renting two rooms and an enclosed balcony in a Darlinghurst slum, not far from William Street. In Barnard Eldershaw’s estimation, Harry has been forced to bear the violence of modernity in all its aspects. He fought and killed for the hollow ideals of King and Country in the first war, tried to make a living from land already denuded by mismanagement, and the city can only offer him a series of menial, demeaning jobs. Unlike his wife, Harry remains alert to the lie of the phantasmagoria, and ‘the bright prizes of the city awoke his country man’s distrust’ (65). A strong man ‘with a vestige of military carriage still in his bearing’, the metropolis wears Harry down physically, and after years without work during the Depression, he feels he has ‘gone soft in mind and body … a sick unwillingness dragged him down’ (187, 115). Mumford reports similar about residents of the megalopolis, from whom ‘the impulse to live departs … as it might depart from someone who had been crushed under the wheels of a locomotive. The impulse to die supplants it’ (1970: 271). Harry occupies himself by walking mindlessly through the city. In his eyes, it is hellish:

5 Critics have speculated why Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow is such a departure from Barnard Eldershaw’s other work, which often features sensitive, mature portraits of women (see Modjeska 2014: 284; Lamond 2005: 124; Dever 1994: 143). I would suggest the answer may lie with the authors’ desire to place their novel within a particular generic mode (speculative, apocalyptic fiction) and modes of ideological discourse dominated by men. It is fascinating that in the relationship between Knarf and Ord, Barnard Eldershaw reproduce a collaborative authorial relationship resembling their own (conversation between Knarf and Ord governs the shape of the narrative, especially in its latter sections), but assign the roles to men.

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he had an impulse to escape from the city, the doomed city, closing in on him, crushing him slowly to death, beating him into its pavements, where the ceaseless footsteps passed. That image really did haunt his mind, of a man, himself, sinking still sentient into the macadam. A city paved with men. Standing at the corner of William Street, watching the traffic stream up the hill at dusk on a winter’s night, the cars like Frankensteins of the jungle, robot animals of unvarying, mindless, mechanical ferocity, coming from prey and going to prey, the tender sky fenced by the hard serrations of the city’s skyline, the living, changing earth sealed beneath the insentient and unchanging concrete, he felt himself grow unreal along with the things he cared for, came to feel that he no longer existed for anyone about him, but turning, not to stone, but to concrete, the grey, dead, false stone. (111–112)

This is a petrified landscape: the living earth is trapped beneath concrete as Harry is trapped by the city. He moves forward physically, but mentally and spiritually he is pulled downwards. He becomes concrete, as unreal, insentient and unchanging as the phantasmagoria itself. The image of a ‘city paved with men’ accords with Benjamin’s articulation of historicism in Thesis VII as a ‘triumphal procession in which the present rulers step over those who are lying prostrate’. ‘The spoils are carried along in the procession’ of historicism—a lineal, progressive telling of the past (2007: 256). In Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow, Barnard Eldershaw relocate Harry as Everyman out of their own time, turning him into a historical relic to be salvaged by Knarf’s novel, which champions the values that might have saved him. In so doing, they direct a critical, backward gaze onto their present.

Ghost City of Paper For Mumford, the megalopolis as myth is a ‘ghost city of paper’ (2007: 257). In it, the individual lives ‘not in the real world, but in a shadow world projected around him at every moment by means of paper and celluloid’ (255–56). Barnard Eldershaw’s Sydney bears some resemblance to Mumford’s ghost city of paper. Books are among the cornucopia described in the first pages of Knarf’s novel: Wheeled stalls with pyramids of oranges, pyramids of last year’s apples wrapped in wisps of tissue paper, bags of peanuts, medleys of brightly packaged sweets and tobaccos, blocked the way and caught the passing

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traffic. The two big bookstalls flaunted coloured reading matter tier on tier, high over the heads of the people. Hard, searching light beat down. (45)

These books are a commodity to be consumed and disposed of like ‘last year’s apples’, but they also tower ‘high over the heads’ of the people. This description suggests Barnard Eldershaw’s reckoning with the position of books, literature and language in urban modernity and in times of crisis. As newspapers, propaganda and escapist fantasy, paper contributes to the phantasmagoria as a ‘bright facile sphere of words’ (340). As serious literature, paper challenges it—although as crisis mounts, this challenge seems less assured. Knarf and Ord discuss the 1930s as ‘fateful decade’, a ‘graveyard of lost causes’ and the ‘last chance before the cataclysm’ (135). ‘It was so full of endeavour and so empty of imagination’, Knarf laments. It was a ‘decade of books’ but so few had real meaning: Books poured from the presses, prodigal of information, focussing attention on the present. Eye witnesses’ accounts. Books of foreign correspondents who had had it straight from the horse’s mouth. Left Book Clubs. Pamphlets. Penguins and Pelicans. Men talking. Men listening. Everything predicted. Hitler writing a book Mein Kampf telling the world what he would do, how he would do it. … The whole impulse of the decade expending itself in books. Scandals and crises following so fast on one another’s heels that each erased the effects of the last. Men lived with printed horrors until they became calloused. So many sticking points but none of them stuck. So much propaganda that people learned not to listen, or, listening, to discount. … It was the brief day of the intellectual, the orgy of ideologies. (138)

Barnard Eldershaw employ here clipped verbless sentences, as they do throughout the novel to represent the phantasmagoria’s combination of surface chaos and essential vacuity. Books as brand names, Penguin and Pelican, remind us of their imbrication in consumer capitalism. Like mass consumer culture, this ‘orgy of ideologies’ makes promises it cannot fulfil, leaving people apathetic, cynical and desensitised to violence. There is some self-reflexivity here, given Barnard and Eldershaw dabbled in political pamphleteering in the early years of the war. In Knarf’s novel, high literary culture is represented by the nameless ‘Starving Poet of Kings Cross’, a caricature of the modernist flaneur-poet.

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The Starving Poet—who is actually a ‘well-paid public servant’—is a ‘disciple of the new mechanic beauty, seeing old things in guise of new and the new in terms of the old, weaving the world together with simile and image’ (32). The poet is writing an ‘epic in blank verse’ entitled the ‘Spring Symphony’; its theme is ‘man in search of civilization’ (193). Through the poet, Barnard Eldershaw indulge in excessively imagistic prose as they shape the consciousness of a man who thinks ‘it is good when the mind wells with great images. It puts the world between your hands. They don’t have to be true’ (194). Walking through the streets like a ‘prophet’, he thinks musingly about urban modernity (193): Was this the new jungle? Labyrinthine life. Neon lights for flowers, traffic instead of rivers flowing in the narrow gulches of streets, synthetic barbarism of jazz and swing on tap in every cave-like flat. The old things sharpened and dramatized, synthesised, canned, bottled, injected. The folk mind of the people accepting the machine and building with it. Folk patterns in a mechanised world. Curious, immense. But doomed. Perhaps doomed. … I stand now upon the peak of the doomed world. It is doom that makes the light so bright, that heightens the tempo. (194)

We know that the Starving Poet is a satirical figure, but his language and outlook differ little from the novel as a whole, especially in its descriptions of the city. The real difference is that the Starving Poet remains caught in the dreamworld; he might identify the ‘armour of unreality’ and ‘romance’ covering the human ‘brain’ and ‘heart’, but he does not attempt to pierce it (131). As Benjamin writes of the Surrealists, the Starving Poet provides an ‘inadequate and undialectical conception of the nature of intoxication’ (1979: 236). Accordingly, he becomes wholly obsessed with his work and loses all touch with reality. As the world moves closer to war, the poet ‘hardly read the news, he no longer cared. He was quite apart. He was exalted and everything he saw now wore a changed and significant aspect’ (315). The ‘Starving Poet of Kings Cross’ is not only a caricature, but an anachronism. Readers familiar with Sydney’s literary history would associate him with the bohemianism of the 1920s, not the later decades in which Barnard Eldershaw place him.6 In ‘Inside the Whale’, George Orwell famously drew a line in the sand between writers of the twenties 6 See Kirkpatrick (1992).

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and thirties. If the keynote of the former was a ‘tragic sense of life’, for the latter it was ‘serious purpose’ (1968: 520). Of the high modernists that preceded his generation, Orwell writes: Why always the sense of decadence, the skulls and cactuses, the yearning after lost faith and impossible civilizations? Was it not, after all, because these people were writing in an exceptionally comfortable epoch? It is just in such times that ‘cosmic despair’ can flourish. People with empty bellies never despair of the universe, nor even think about the universe, for that matter. (509)

The Starving Poet and his ‘Spring Symphony’ accord with Orwell’s caricature so closely one wonders whether Barnard or Eldershaw were familiar with the essay. He too searches for a lost civilisation, luxuriating in doom while comfortably supported by his public servant’s salary. Against the Starving Poet’s ‘tragic sense of life’, Barnard Eldershaw set Knarf’s ‘serious purpose’. Knarf is clear about why he wrote Little World Left Behind: he wants to light the spark of liberty in his own time; he plans to leave the manuscript on the ‘communal altar’ like an offering (21). His son Ren is advocating for greater public involvement in government policy, and Knarf thinks the cause might be helped ‘if the book he had just written worked on people’s imaginations, leavened them, and so, circuitously, made a track in the wilderness for Ren’s feet’ (228). Knarf’s purpose is roughly analogous with Barnard Eldershaw’s understanding of the role of writer. ‘Life itself is the raw material of the writer’, they wrote in a 1937 essay on Knarf’s namesake, their friend and colleague Frank Dalby Davison. ‘What we ask of him is to shape the chaos of life as we live it into a comprehensible whole, to illumine it so that we may see its meaning, to draw out its essence’ (1938: 113). However, Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow was written in much more uncertain times; accordingly, it expresses and performs an anxious reconsideration of the writer’s purpose and the novel’s efficacy. Writing on British fiction after 1939, John Whittier-Ferguson argues that ‘moral and aesthetic forms of defiance’ began to seem ‘less obviously powerful and consolatory’ (2014: 201). Writers became less able or willing to rely on the ‘illusion that aesthetic form can tidy up the shambles of history’ (202). Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow is propelled by a struggle between faith in its project of historical reconciliation through fictional representation, and despair at the unlikeliness of its success. Indeed, Knarf

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is pictured ‘struggling with the great mass of his book’ (304). Due to time constraints, he is forced to pick only sections to read. Curiously, he leaves out parts he claims are his ‘tour de force’, but reads fragmentary sketches featuring characters largely superfluous to the main narrative (341). At one point in his discussion with Ord, Knarf quotes ‘a passage in an old book, one of the few chance preserved from this very last decade’ (140). The book in question is Arthur Koestler’s The Gladiators (1939), which is identified, along with its year of publication, in a footnote at the bottom of the page (141). Koestler’s narrative came out of the same ‘1939 state’ that produced Barnard Eldershaw’s novel and shares its urge to intervene in the present through an epic narrative of civilisation’s rise and fall. However, Knarf’s reference to Koestler is immediately followed by his pronouncement that he ‘can’t read [Ord] all this’ (141). He ‘ruffled a pile of papers with his fingers. … “The best I can do is pick out the voices here and there…”’ (141). The reference to Koestler’s work, followed by this statement from Knarf, is designed to highlight the multitudinous and chaotic form of the latter’s novel. This chaos affects both Little World Left Behind and Tomorrow.

Total War After the dreamworld of mass consumerism and the doomed city of the Great Depression, Knarf’s novel moves to Sydney in wartime: The face of the city was changed. Mounds of raw tan-coloured soil weathered and paled in the parks where the slit trenches were dug. Sandbags and scaffolding cluttered the narrow pavements, facades were masked in brickwork, plateglass was plastered against the shattering blast of bombs. The traffic had changed, army trucks and camouflaged waggons, few private cars, monstrous growths of producer-gas installations, or strange ballooning sacks of coal gas on the cars, crowded trams and trains. The crowds in the street were changed. Everywhere uniforms, men and women, air force, navy, A.I.F., militia, American marines, soldiers, and airmen. (294)

Barnard Eldershaw’s narration of the war wavers between real dread at probable attack and critique of war’s ‘secondary consequences’: fearmongering propaganda and the curtailing of liberties by government legislation. ‘Is this Socialism or is it Fascism?’ a character asks in response to new National Security laws. ‘No one knew what it might turn out to

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be’ (276). Barnard Eldershaw employ broad satire in scenes where hapless police officers raid the homes of activists and writers, looking for seditious literature: They took all the books with red covers, that’s all, and an atlas and a Bible in Yiddish which I borrowed from old Isaac for the purpose. Thought they’d got something that time, probably a code for blowing up the British Empire. Not enough evidence there to drown a kitten. (260)

For Barnard Eldershaw, the war is also a kind of phantasmagoria; indeed, one young fighter pilot uses the word when he realises ‘through all the superimposed layers of routines, technicalities, and fatigues’, his ‘own part in the world’s phantasmagoria’ (337–38). In Sydney during wartime, the display windows have been ‘plastered’ against bombs, cars as ‘Frankensteins in the jungle’ are now camouflaged wagons, piled sweets and stockings are replaced with ‘sacks of coal gas’, and late-night shoppers have become soldiers and military personnel. The structural similarities between the two descriptions show that the city’s ‘face’ may have changed, but underneath the pattern remains the same. The city of mass consumerism and the city in wartime are little different: both manipulate and oppress its citizenry. As historian Jill Roe notes, however, the book does capture the very real sense of ‘suppressed panic’ in Sydney after Singapore fell to the Japanese in February 1942, leaving Australia ‘threatened and isolated’ (Roe 1984: 245). That same month, Japanese planes raided Darwin at the north-eastern tip of Australia, which had become an important base in the Allied defence of the East Indies. More than two hundred people lost their lives in the attack. On 31 May, three midget Japanese submarines were launched with the intention of invading Sydney Harbour. Two of the three made it beyond the anti-submarine net, and one fired a torpedo which hit and exploded the requisitioned Sydney ferry Kuttabal. Twenty-one Allied naval servicemen were killed (Perryman). In this context, the waterway becomes the subject of extended narration for the first time in the novel. The harbour makes Sydney legible, and this means it is the city’s biggest liability during wartime. As Barnard writes in The Sydney Book, ‘an effort to camouflage the city was made although it was realised that the sculptured coastline and unique harbour would inevitability betray it in any moonlit night’ (1947: 76). In Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow, the ‘gleaming waterway’ is a threat (324):

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The summer carnival on the beaches was over. They were wired and patrolled, forbidden, out of bounds. The long Pacific rollers broke on untrodden sand again. The moon silhouetted not lovers but tinhatted soldiers on guard. The coastal scrub masked camps, where the trainees practised counter-invasion tactics and the snouts of guns poked up out of the sand dunes. But still long stretches of the lonely seaboard ached empty and vulnerable on the map. A boom stretched across the entrance of the harbour. The brilliance of the metropolitan night was gone. Black and blind, the coast faced the sea. Only sometimes a rod of blue light from a searchlight measured the immensity of the sky. (295)

The fruitful freedom of the beach, the flow of international traffic through the Heads and the bright lights of city on the coast are familiar to readers of other Sydney fiction, where they serve as emblems of the city’s modern identity. Barnard Eldershaw subvert these images to show a different, more threatening manifestation of modernity. In 1956 Barnard connected two symbols of modern transnational connection, the radio and the aeroplane, with war. The radio brought minute-by-minute news of the war; the plane brought possible invasion and bombardment. These ‘links’ to the world, Barnard writes, made Sydney ‘more cosmopolitan, more responsive, more vulnerable’ (1956: 72). In Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow, declaration of war coincides with intensification of the drought: ‘The country was very dry. There had been a drought on the catchment area for five years and now there was talk of water restrictions in the city’ (210). Barnard Eldershaw connect war and drought through the motif of dust. Leo Mellor identifies the use of ash and dust in World War II writing as an ‘insidious memento mori … suggestive of suppressed violence’ (2011: 161). Eventually in Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow, the ‘smoke and dust of bombed cities’ invade Sydney, first from aerial bombardment by the Japanese and then when its citizens reduce the banks and offices, ‘bulwarks of the old world’, to ‘fountains of dust’ (317, 402). But before war, the city is ‘impregnated with dust and smoke’ from bushfires and the ‘dusty breath’ of dried-up rivers, which ‘carried blight for hundreds of miles’ (256, 19). Barnard Eldershaw must imagine the dust of the bombings, but dust from the drought was a real presence in Sydney during the 1940s. Huge dust storms from western New South Wales rolled over the city, requiring lights be turned on during the day (Gergis 2018). In Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow, one character imagines an apocalypse caused not by wartime bombs but drought:

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“We cut down the trees and clear the scrub, grass grows, we bring the sheep and the rabbits and they eat the grass. In a dry spell they dig out the roots of the grass and ringbark the trees that are left. The rains come and channel the naked earth, scar it with crevices. The heat dries the earth to powder, the wind carries it away. No exhalation rises to refill the clouds. The wind and the dust scarify the country. The seed reserve is exhausted, dried out, blown away. The future dies.” (174)

The focal point of the novel’s wartime section is the first citywide blackout test, which occurred in real life on 17 August 1941. The event features almost all of the novel’s expansive cast of characters, and at twenty pages it receives more of Barnard Eldershaw’s attention than the imagined bombing of the city just pages later. This is because the blackout usefully crystallises the dialectic of ruin and phantasmagoria that underpins the novel’s depiction of the city in modernity. The blackout test is a rehearsal for a performance of a city under threat. For Barnard Eldershaw, this artificiality is crucial, because it draws attention to the city’s inherent artificiality. When the lights are turned off, the phantasmagoria is revealed. When Paula Ramsay walks through the darkened streets, she traces the ‘unexpected outlines’ of a city made in turns ‘strange’, ‘new’, ‘marvellous’ and ‘foreign’ (280). Darkness brings ‘sharp clarity’ to familiar scenes (284). With Bowie, a peace activist, and the unnamed Professor, Paula discusses the absence of light. The conversation precedes without dialogue tags, so that it seems as if the voices come directly out of the darkness about which they speak: “Every day the light paints a new city, but we’ve got the convention of what it looks like so stuck in the mud of our imaginations that we don’t see it. We live in a mirage and don’t know it. It takes something unusual to shock our eyes open. We live in a flux and a mirage.” “There are thousands of cities here, everyone has one to himself.” “When you make the idea too mystical it blows away altogether, like a cobweb.” “There’s a solid core of bricks and stone, but in itself it is meaningless. Over it the city of the imagination is laid, layer upon layer. We build it out of ourselves as the bees build their comb.” “So if it is destroyed, it won’t matter.” …“If the city were bombed no one would think of saving the valuable things. All the wrong things would be saved.” “The G.P.O., for instance.”

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“The quick, the pulse would be buried under the debris. It would be forgotten because no one had recognised it.” (284)

Here, the blackout ‘shocks’ characters into realising that their city is a ‘flux and a mirage’ (90, 82). If Sydney were bombed, the symbol of modernity’s linear temporality—the General Post Office building in Martin Place, whose large clock tower set the city’s time—would be saved (and indeed the clock tower was removed in 1942 to reduce the chance of bombardment), but the ‘quick, the pulse’ would be buried beneath the debris. With their eyes shocked open, the characters experience Sydney as a space of heterotopic potential: if the city is an imagined construct, then surely it can be reimagined after its destruction. A similar sentiment animates Elizabeth Bowen’s blackout story, ‘Mysterious Kôr’, in which Pepita and her soldier lover Arthur wander through the darkened streets of London. Pepita states: The war shows us that we’ve by no means come to the end. If you can blow whole places out of existence, you can blow whole places into it. I don’t see why not. They say we can’t say what’s come out since the bombing’s started. (1999: 730)

Earlier in Barnard Eldershaw’s novel, the city is described as ‘making men in its image, conditioning their characters as well as their daily lives’ (91). In the blackout, this relationship is reversed: characters imagine a city remade in their image. Paula, Bowie and the Professor list what they would salvage from the city to take with them into the future, choosing items that correspond with their particular worldview and ideology. Bowie says he would save ‘the youngest child I could find, because there’d be a chance he might be a Shakespeare or a Beethoven’ (284). His choice reflects a utopian faith in the power of culture to rejuvenate civilisation. Paula lives in a ‘vacuum’ of middle-class gentility, and she chooses a ‘powder box that I have. It belonged to my great great grandmother, it’s beautiful and sophisticated and I love it. I know what it is, it would never turn out to be something else, a Bluebeard or a Ned Kelly’ (188, 284). Paula pins her hope for the future on an inherited commodity, an item that she has endowed with the security of familial history. The Professor is considered, simply and pointedly, ‘the last word in ineffective intellectuals’ (243). No wonder then that he chooses to save himself (285).

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Paula, Bowie and the Professor are among the most privileged of the city’s population. This allows them to approach the city conceptually, maintain some detachment from its destruction and think immediately about recovery. Conversely, Harry’s experience of the blackout leads him to recognise how the city’s spatial and social inequalities have produced a population unable to defend themselves: Old houses, encrusted with balconies, temporary partitions, bric-a-brac, lumber of all sorts. Inflammable. The back lanes, culs-de-sac—what a shambles it would be, what a trap, if the bombs began to fall. Imagine fire in those crowded streets. And panic, the logical retribution of the sordid greedy herding. And the unconsolidated people. Thousands of them, living alone in single rooms, without families, without friends, without resources. A few bombs and the whole fabric would break down and gutter down the hill into the slums below. (282)

Paula, on the other hand, acknowledges that when she thinks about the city’s destruction, ‘I’m always somewhere else when the bombs fall’ (287). Harry dies during the imagined bombing of Sydney by Japan, turned to ‘dust in history’ by modernity’s systemic injustices. The night the planes come, Harry runs out into the bombarded streets, intent on saving his young ex-lover Gwen, who is one of the ‘unconsolidated people’ stuck in the flammable slums. ‘There was a smell of—what—cordite? in the air’, Barnard Eldershaw write, mixed with smoke and the odour of civilisation breaking down, ruptured drains, ruptured gasmains. The noise, which was immense again, seemed to come at him in flying walls of sound through which he passed. Metal rain was beating on the dry city. (326)

The bombing is written into the pattern of violence that undergirds Barnard Eldershaw’s vision of urban modernity. The smell of smoke, ruptured drains and gasmains becomes ‘the odour of civilisation breaking down’. War is again linked to drought by the grimly ironic image of metal rain beating down upon the dry city. Harry realises there is nothing new about this violence: ‘It was a new world—no, not a new world’, he thinks, ‘the old world unmasked’ (326). In his final moments, Harry’s life flashes before his eyes, but it comes to him as one long, frantic run from a death that he now knows has always pursued him. The William

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Street hill—the novel’s road of progress—becomes a slope at Gapa Tepe and a ‘crumbling French village out of Bouchevenes’, then the ‘blasted and hopeless’ streets he roamed during the Depression (327). Harry’s movement towards death reflects history as a ‘state of emergency’ for the oppressed (Benjamin 2007: 257). As Gwen says just prior to the bombing, ‘It has happened. It’ll go on happening. We’re helpless. All of us’ (281). Barnard Eldershaw introduce but ultimately refuse theological and Marxist framings of Harry’s death. His daughter Ruth mourns him as a victim not of Japanese planes but ‘the wasteful vicious world’ and its easy sacrifice of working-class men (348): “He got hurt plenty,” she thought. She didn’t mean what had happened last night. “He was hurt so bad there was nothing for them to do but kill him.” Them. She indicated the whole world. “If you hurt people enough, you got to kill them.” It broke her heart open. He was Ben too. And Sid. And—the twisting pain forced the last name out of her mind—and Jesus. (330)

This is not the first time the narrative compares Harry as Everyman to Jesus in broad theological metaphor. Earlier in the novel, Harry’s boss Olaf Ramsay spots him at a dawn service and thinks: Like meeting Jesus at a railway station. Time a war was fought for men like that. What a mess. What a mess the world was in. We die and don’t know why. The wrong people die. It can’t go on. (167)

In the hallucinatory interview with God that follows, Olaf asks if the creator can help Harry, the Everyman who ‘had a raw deal’ (169). God demurs; there is nothing to be done because ‘the historic moment has not come’ (169). Looking at the trajectory of the narrative, the bombing could be this ‘historic moment’: the death of Everyman is swiftly followed by the destruction of Sydney by revolutionary forces. However, the exchange with God is satirical, featuring Barnard Eldershaw’s aforementioned mockery of Wells and Shaw. God’s pronouncement is undermined, revealed as the sort of hollow promise utopians like Wells and Shaw might offer to their readers. Barnard Eldershaw are less willing to provide salvation.

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Necropolis In H.G. Wells’s paradigmatic work of interwar future history, The Shape of Things to Come (1933), widespread violence, death and the near total destruction of civilisation are cast as the necessary precursors to a utopian future. There is a reasonable chance that Barnard Eldershaw knew of the book, at least in outline. Wells’s last stop on his 1939 Australian tour was to address a dinner hosted by the Fellowship of Australian Writers in Sydney (Haynes 1990: 340). At the time, Eldershaw was president of the FAW and Barnard was heavily involved in its management. It seems likely one or both would have prepared for the meeting by reading Wells’s work. The Shape of Things to Come and Barnard Eldershaw’s novel share certain similarities. Both have frame narratives that feature a future intellectual composing a history of the twentieth century. Both predict that World War II will end in total exhaustion, leaving behind civil unrest and social collapse. Both include episodes of plague. In The Shape of Things to Come, the end of civilisation results in the formation of a world government run according to scientific principles, which in turn ushers in a new utopian age. This is where Barnard Eldershaw’s future history departs from its predecessor. Aspects of Knarf’s world make it better than the past, but we are certainly not meant to view it as a utopia. The twentyfourth century has rid the world of capitalism and solved the continent’s environmental problems with a model of scientific, socialist agrarianism. But the people have little liberty, and perpetual peace and plenty have made them apathetic and intellectually listless. When Knarf’s son Ren launches a vote to allow the populace more say in government affairs, the results show that the overwhelming majority have no opinion one way or another. If there is no utopian future in Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow, the destruction of Sydney cannot be read as a necessary crisis or remaking of society. Instead, it is an explosion of fury from a populace starved of dignity and security. ‘Where lives are cramped and expression measured out by a niggardly state’, Barnard Eldershaw write in ‘Liberty and Violence’, ‘release into violence is a relief’ (1995: 255). During the late 1930s and early forties, a ‘sizeable proportion of the intelligentsia’ believed that the war signalled the end of capitalism and redemption of all those lost to it (Piette 1995: 41). Herbert Read wrote in May 1941: ‘War will give place to social revolution, to vast movements of spiritual revulsion and ardent, hopeful planning’ (qtd. in Piette 1995: 40–41). This kind of Marxist eschatology is represented in Barnard

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Eldershaw’s novel by Sid, who spearheads the scorched earth policy that destroys the city. Sid believes that the destruction of the city ‘would shake the world with the first grand negation of greed, the act of primary anarchy that must prelude reconstruction’ (386). He concedes that the people will suffer, but ‘only so could the tide of history be turned’ (386). For him, ‘every stone’ of the city is ‘tainted’ by capitalism (386). Here Sid echoes Steven Spender’s exuberant anti-urban sentiment in his Blitz poem, ‘Destruction and Resurrection’ (1941): ‘Burst open with vermillion the packed night /of money, in the silent city!’ (qtd. Mellor 2011: 61). In Barnard Eldershaw’s narration, however, the destruction of the city is not necessarily its deserved fate or an explosive impetus to revolution; rather, it is a nihilistic giving way to the same conditioned violence that saw Ally beat her son on the train home from the city in 1924. Although Harry’s daughter Ruth would have good reason to lash out at the city and circumstances that killed him, she fears Sid’s ‘ruthless idealism that would destroy everything for … pie in the sky’ (381). Ruth knows ‘in her heart that the destroyer could never be the builder’ (406). Sid’s programme of revolutionary destruction piles up more rubble as it storms into the future (Benjamin 2007: 257). In the midst of the conflagration, Sid and Ruth climb the AWA tower, the tallest structure in Sydney, so that Sid can ‘make a survey’ of the damage (404). Barnard Eldershaw preserve the tower in order to provide a cinematic sweep over the central business district as it falls to flames. The city is ‘immense and unrecognisable’, ‘layered to the horizon in smoke and flame’ (404). Sid notes with satisfaction the collapse of colonial monuments and sites of capitalist power: Macquarie Street and Parliament House burn ‘with great dignity’ (404). That pinnacle of modern engineering and unequivocal symbol of Sydney, the Harbour Bridge, ‘had been dynamited’ and it ‘hung half-destroyed, leviathan wounded’ (405). The bridge’s injury is more affecting than if it was gone altogether; it inverts those luminous modernist paintings by Grace Cossington Smith and Dorrit Black, replacing the unfinished bridge of possibility with a bridge unmade by destruction. Barnard Eldershaw pause in their cataloguing of colonial monuments lost to flames to describe a ‘bushfire in the Botanic Gardens’, flying over the grass, climbing the trees, hanging them with leaves of flame, shrivelling in an instant all the little bushes, blackening the statues

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and leaving them hideously extruded, like corpses, from the scene whose natural beauty they had once been expected to leaven with culture. (404)

This is not imagined destruction, nor is it inspired by the Blitz: in 1939 numerous Sydney newspapers carried photographs from the Victorian fires: walls of flame, burnt out cars, trees lit up in the moment of their conflagration.7 The novel makes other connections between the two disasters: seeing the smoke, residents in the outer suburbs confuse the burning city for a bushfire. There are ‘westerlies blowing a half gale’ and Sid concludes with satisfaction that ‘the weather is helping us’ (403). In the aftermath of the Victorian fires, the Royal Commission set up to investigate its cause and the prevention of future disasters concluded that ‘these fires were lit by the hand of man’, referring to excessive land clearing and irresponsible fire usage during a time of severe drought (Stratton 1939: 5). In Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow, it is significant that the city falls from fires lit by men, rather than falling bombs. In this way, the destruction of the city also serves as a climax of the novel’s indictment of settler modernity’s environmental failings. Describing the 1939 fires as ‘some of the most terrible […] of our history’, Barnard Eldershaw wrote in the revised edition of My Australia that ‘the country may be a phoenix, but hardly in the lifetime of the dispossessed’ (1951: 217). Their implication is that the possibility of future recovery means little to those directly affected by the catastrophe. They make a similar point in the novel when Harry is remembered as the city starts to break down: The world might be fashioned anew by an immense effort of the spirit of man, but there would be no reparation for Harry and all those who, like him, had been so casually destroyed in the sight of their fellows. No resurrection. (368–69)

Little World Left Behind ends with Harry’s son Ben, who has driven out of the city to the countryside, where he stands on a hill overlooking the collapsing metropolis. Ben maintains that he does not mourn for the city, for ‘not one brick of it had been his’ (413). However, unlike Sid who cannot think beyond the moment of destruction, Ben acknowledges that ‘a new pattern of life would have to be born unless the Australian people 7 See, for example, Australasian 1939, January 21, 3.

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were going to live amongst the ruins for ever’ (415). Knarf ends his novel with a pointed summation of Barnard Eldershaw’s ideological aims: The destruction of the city was only a symbol, an act of repudiation of all the city had come to mean, a gesture single in all its complexity, and a solution on in so far as by destroying the accepted mould it forced men to create another. Ben stood on a hillside in the apochryphal [sic] night, eating his apple. (415)

The apple’s appearance resurrects for a moment the theological interpretation of Harry as Jesus. Ben, his son, has seen the fall but holds within him the promise of future redemption. Knarf wrote the book for his son, and thus this promise of redemption is delivered as a model of patrilineal inheritance. In this final passage, my attention is drawn by the misspelled word ‘apocryphal’. Preserved in the Virago release from the original 1947 Georgian House edition, the mistake reminds me of the capacity of the novel form to complicate or contravene the intentions of its authors. No matter how strongly a writer may aspire to the total view, this project must always fail. As Saint-Amour argues, the truly counter-totalising work. avows the partiality of its totality claims without renouncing them, taking up totalization under the sign of its impossibility. A truly partial work preserves a trace of the whole that it negates, thereby warning us not to misrecognize fragmentariness as a new and self-sufficient totality. (2015: 10)

Before Knarf concludes his reading, Ord thinks that the book is ‘so real that it might burst open the whole convention of modern writing, even touch the bedded-down imagination of a slothful generation’ (239). Here Barnard Eldershaw express faith in the novel’s capacity to break through the phantasmagoria and force the dreaming collective to wake. Yet, in the aftermath of the reading, Ord reviews his opinion: [He] knew that when he came to read the book and found it inevitably composed of ordered words building up a rational succession of pictures and concepts, he would lose the impression, be unable to recapture it. Now he could only turn his face away from the light and watch Knarf’s

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hands among his papers, feeling constraint gradually overtake his emotion, petrifying it. (416)

What matters—what has power—is the singular moment of Knarf’s fragmented reading. The novel as a totality will ‘petrify’ its revolutionary force.

Conclusion When Sydney begins to self-destruct, the Starving Poet of Kings Cross flees in terror, leaving behind the Spring Symphony. The novel describes the flames claiming the ‘closely written sheets’ of the left-behind poem: They began to flutter and struggle for life. Some were blown into corners and stayed there flickering ineffectually against the walls, but others rose and eddied, sank, rose again each time higher, like a ballet when the intoxication of the music begins to work, some escaped into the street. The street was utterly deserted, loud with the noise of fire, distant and at hand. It was undestroyed but on the verge of destruction. The whole street seemed about to explode. There was wind but no air, as it might be inside a furnace. The pages were carried along like dry autumn leaves. Some rose above the houses and were consumed by fires in neighbouring streets. Others took fire in mid-air, burned for a second and fell. No word of it escaped. (407–08)

This is a mutual unbecoming of text and place, city and words. When one considers this short scene in light of the fact that the opening and concluding parts of Barnard Eldershaw’s novel are called ‘Aubade’ and ‘Nocturne’, it is easy to equate the burning Symphony with the book as a whole. Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow, I would argue, disintegrates as the city does. There are fewer line breaks clearly delineating the frame; Barnard Eldershaw switch between the two timelines frequently and sometimes within the same paragraph. Knarf skips sections of his novel and replaces them with monologic recount as he responds to Ord’s prompting questions. We can take the analogy between the Poet’s thwarted epic and Barnard Eldershaw’s novel further when we consider the work of Saunders (1993) and Cunneen (2003), whose comparative analyses of the 1947 and 1983 editions reveal that there is no definitive version of Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow. Yet, these instabilities allow the novel to embody the complexities of urban modernity and

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question its narrative of teleological progress, while also showing the difficulties of achieving this project. It is the spontaneous dance of words through the slum, language and literature burning in the city streets, that best represents what Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow offers to Sydney fiction. Barnard and Eldershaw’s final novel marks an endpoint to a vibrant period of women’s writing in Australia and literary reflection on Sydney. World War II remade the city again, and Australian modernism became primarily associated with the post-war work of Patrick White. Against this and the growing conservatism of the 1950s literary establishment, female writers and their work were mostly regulated to ‘middlebrow’ status and ignored until the 1980s (Modjeska 2014). However, there is no better novel than Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow to end the project begun by Christina Stead’s Seven Poor Men of Sydney thirteen years earlier. As one character says late in the narrative, ‘there aren’t any words that haven’t been spoiled’ (428). In Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow, Barnard Eldershaw kill off the novel and destroy the city, launching and then abandoning an attempt to redeem them both. In this way, the work so compellingly represents the interwar period’s earnest yet problematic attempt to synthesise politics and literature, to create and deploy a modern urban poetics capable of capturing and critiquing the Australian experience of urban modernity.

Works Cited Barnard, Marjorie. Sydney: The Story of a City. Carlton: Melbourne UP, 1956. Barnard, Marjorie with drawings by Sydney Ure Smith. The Sydney Book. Sydney: Sydney Ure Smith, 1947. Barnard Eldershaw, M. Essays in Australian Fiction. Carlton: Melbourne UP, 1938. ———. Tomorrow and Tomorrow. London: Georgian House, 1947. ———. My Australia. London: Jarrolds Publishers, 1951. ———. Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow. London: Virago, 1983. ———. “Liberty and Violence.” In M. Barnard Eldershaw: Plaque with Laurel, Essays, Reviews and Correspondence, edited by Maryanne Dever, 251–58. St. Lucia: U of Queensland P, 1995. Beckingsale, Marjorie. “Woman’s Vivid Story of Victorian Holocaust.” Women’s Weekly, 1939, January 21, 3. Benjamin, Walter. One-Way Street and Other Writings. Translated by Edmund Jephcott and Kingsley Shorter. London: NLB, 1979.

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———. The Arcades Project. Translated by Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin. Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard UP, 1999. ———. The Writer of Modern Life: Essays on Charles Baudelaire. Translated by Howard Eiland, Edmund Jephcott, Rodney Livingston and Harry Zohn. Edited by Michael W. Jennings. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2006. ———. Illuminations. Translated by Harry Zohn. New York: Schocken Books, 2007. ———. Origin of the German Trauerspiel. Translated by Howard Eiland. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2019. Bowen, Elizabeth. Collected Stories. London: Random House, 1999. Buci-Glucksmann, Christine. Baroque Reason: The Aesthetics of Modernity. Translated by Patrick Camiller. London: Sage Publications, 1994. Carter, David. Always Almost Modern: Australian Print Cultures and Modernity. North Melbourne: Australian Scholarly Publishing, 2013. Cunneen, Rachel. “Organs of Becoming: Reading, Editing and Censoring the Texts of M. Barnard Eldershaw’s Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow.” PhD Thesis. Australian National University, 2003. Dalziell, Tanya. “Belated Arrivals: Gender, Colonialism and Modernism in Australia.” In Modernism, edited by Astradur Eysteinsson and Vivian Liska, 769–80. Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Company, 2007. Dever, Maryanne. “‘No Time Is Inopportune for a Protest’: Aspects of the Political Activities of Marjorie Barnard and Flora Eldershaw.” Hecate 17, no. 2 (1991): 9–11, 13–21. ———. “‘Conventional Women of Ability’: M. Barnard Eldershaw and the Question of Cultural Authority.” In Wallflowers and Witches: Women and Culture in Australia 1910–1945, edited by Maryanne Dever, 133–47. St. Lucia: U of Queensland P, 1994. Ellis, Steve. British Writers and the Approach of World War II. New York: Cambridge UP, 2015. Ferrier, Carole, ed. As Good as a Yarn with You: Letters between Miles Franklin, Katherine Susannah Pritchard, Jean Devanny, Marjorie Barnard, Flora Eldershaw and Eleanor Dark. Melbourne: Cambridge UP, 1992. ———. “Flames Carry Calamity for Whole Nation.” Sun, 1939, January 15, 1. Gergis, Joëlle. Sunburnt Country: The History and Future of Climate Change in Australia. Kindle Edition. Carlton: Melbourne UP, 2018. Haynes, Roslynn. “H. G. Wells in Australia.” Australian Literary Studies 14, no. 3 (1990): 336–57. Kirkpatrick, Peter. The Sea Coast of Bohemia: Literary Life in Sydney’s Roaring Twenties. St. Lucia: University of Queensland P, 1992. Lamond, Julieanne. “Writing the ‘Fatal Moment’: Crisis, Community and the Literary Imagination in M. Barnard Eldershaw’s Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow.” JASAL 4 (2005): 121–132.

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Marx, Karl. Capital Volume I. Translated by Ben Fowkes. London: Penguin, 1990. Mellor, Leo. Reading the Ruins: Modernism, Bombsites and British Culture. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2011. Modjeska, Drusilla. Exiles at Home: Australian Women Writers 1925–1945. Sydney: HarperCollins, 2014. Moore, Nicole. “‘Threatened People Don’t Breed’: The Maternal Strike in Australian Women’s Writing 1920s to 1950.” In Current Tensions: Proceedings of the 18th Annual Conference: 6–11 July 1996, edited by Sharyn Pearce and Philip Neilsen, 252–61. Brisbane: Queensland University of Technology, 1996. Mumford, Lewis. The Culture of Cities. San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1970. Orwell, George. The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell: An Age Like This 1920–1940. Edited by Sonia Orwell and Ian Angus. New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1968. Perryman, John. “Japanese Midget Submarine Attack on Sydney Harbour.” Australian Navy. https://www.navy.gov.au/history/feature-histories/jap anese-midget-submarine-attack-sydney-harbour. Piette, Adam. Imagination at War: British Fiction and Poetry, 1939–1945. London: Papermac, 1995. Roe, Jill. “The Historical Imagination and Its Enemies: M. Barnard Eldershaw’s Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow.” Meanjin 43, no. 2 (1984): 241–52. Saint-Amour, Paul K. Tense Future: Modernism, Total War, Encyclopedic Form. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2015. Saunders, Ian. “The Texts of Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow: Author, Agent, History.” Southern Review 26, no. 2 (1993): 239–261. State Library of New South Wales. The Burial Files. Produced by Sabrina Organo. 2019. https://audio.sl.nsw.gov.au/podcast/burial-files. Stratton, L. Report of the Royal Commission to Inquire into the Causes of and Measures Taken to Prevent the Bush Fires of January, 1939 and to Protect Life and Property and the Measures to Be Taken to Prevent Bush Fires in Victoria and to Protect Life and Property in the Event of Future Bush Fires. Melbourne: Govt. Printer, 1939. ———. “Victoria’s Black Week.” Australasian, 1939, January 21, 3. Wells, H. G. The Shape of Things to Come. Hastings: Delphi Classics, 2017. Whittier-Ferguson, John. Mortality and Form in Late Modernist Literature. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014. Wilson, Elizabeth. The Contradictions of Culture: Cities, Cultures, Women. London: Sage, 2001.

CHAPTER 7

Conclusion: Sydney then and Now

In the Australian tradition, which lay in wait, fully formed, for the first settlers, Sydney was built on water. Marjorie Barnard, The Sydney Book. (1956: 6)

In the eighty years since Stead, Cusack, Dark, Tennant and Barnard Eldershaw first confronted the problem of Sydney in modernity, questions of the city’s future have generated increasing anxiety. In March 2018, the Greater Sydney Commission released the latest attempt to alleviate these concerns in the form of its grandly titled plan for the future, A Metropolis of Three Cities. Framed as a blueprint for flattening out spatial hierarchies that for generations have allowed closeness to the city centre to be read as a measure of socio-economic advantage, the plan splits Sydney into three distinct entities. Instead of one metropolis, there will be the ‘Eastern Harbour City’ around the established Central Business District, the ‘Central River City’ with Parramatta at its hub, and the sprawling ‘Western Parkland City’, stretching from Penrith to Macarthur and taking in the ‘aerotropolis’ expected to form around the new Badgery’s Creek international airport. The plan, writes Delia Falconer, ‘may see the old imaginative boundaries of Sydney disappear forever’ (2018). In the report’s preamble, Commissioner Lucy Turnbull explains that this radical revision is in fact a return to Aboriginal understanding of the lands as ‘saltwater country’, ‘muddy river country’, and ‘running water © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 M. Brayshaw, Sydney and Its Waterway in Australian Literary Modernism, Literary Urban Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-64426-0_7

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country’ respectively (2018: 1). ‘Meeting ancient Aboriginal knowledge’ with ‘contemporary land use and planning aims’, Turnbull writes, the plan will ‘ignite a positive shared future for all of Greater Sydney’s people and its stunning environment’ (1). As Falconer points out, however, Turnbull’s mapping of the plan onto Aboriginal knowledges can be read as ‘an attempt to make the huge changes being foisted on the city … sound inevitable because they are historic’ (2018). She quotes Gai-mariagal Professor Gary Foley, who points out that ‘for Aboriginal people, the concept of a border or division is a moving, fluid site’, and thus has little confluence with Western understanding of land as a bounded entity. A Metropolis of Three Cities is the latest example in a long history of water dreaming in Sydney. As we have seen in this book, settlers have always written the waterway into their place-based imaginaries, sometimes appropriating Aboriginal signifiers to do so. In the Commission’s reorganisation of the city as harbour, river and parkland, there is the ghost of Phillip’s original plan for Sydney as Albion, an elegant, non-commercial and non-industrial township by the water. In reality, as Grace Karskens explains, this was ‘not a plan for a real commercial port town, but … an abstract triangulation of authority, elegantly drawn mathematical spaces, and the sea’ (2009: 72). In this vein, urban planner Chris Brown (2018) argues that the Commission’s use of ‘superficial discursive tropes’ and ‘spatial metaphors’ in A Metropolis of Three Cities mask a damning lack of ‘substance’: the plan ‘eschews critical analysis of the city’s urban condition in favour of projecting an anesthetised image of Sydney’. Brown concludes, If Sydney is to flourish as a metropolitan region of 8 million people, it will need to dig much deeper, and show far more imagination, than this.

Given the benefit of the doubt, perhaps the Commission’s plan is just radical enough to actually achieve its goals of equalising access and opportunity in the city and responding to the natural environment. Yet it is equally likely that the invocation of the waterway is a rhetorical flourish designed to obscure the very real possibility that splitting the city in three could result in more than rather less inequality, widening the gap between the west and the rest of the city. Furthermore, for all its imagining of a progressive future for Sydney, A Metropolis of Three Cities offers only a vague commitment to address what it refers to as the ‘future shocks and

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stresses’ of climate change (2018: 175). As Falconer remarks, this is a ‘failure of imagination’ that could have devastating results. In 1956, Marjorie Barnard ended her short reflective history, Sydney: The Story of a City, with a pronouncement about the future: The city’s life pattern has been a series of waves, crests and troughs, diminutions and renewals. And so, unless some tidal wave of catastrophe comes, I suppose it will go on. She awaits now a new imaginative impulse, a reshaping and rebuilding and reorientation to her function of a great modern city. (79)

Projections from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change predict that sea levels will rise forty centimetres by 2050 and ninety centimetres by 2100 (Bennett and Beudel 2014: 173). As many commentators have pointed out, this could be catastrophic for Sydney, a city ‘built on water’. Temperatures are rising, and droughts are lasting longer. During the ‘Black Summer’ of 2019–2020, fire broke out in Lane Cove National Park, threatening suburban South Turramurra (BBC News 2019). The Lake Burragorang fire in south-west Sydney burned out of control for months, encroaching upon areas of the Wollondilly region where I live. Visitors to Sydney Harbour in December and January saw an angry orange sun reflected in the water, and the Bridge almost completely obscured by thick smoke. That smoke drifted 12,000 kms across the South Pacific, reaching Argentina and Chile (Dateline 2020). Barnard’s ‘tidal wave of catastrophe’ is already cresting. Where is the ‘new imaginative impulse’ to confront it? As Steve Mentz argues, although literature and literary criticism cannot cool oceans or prevent bushfires, it has always been ‘through language and narrative’ that we have learned to grapple with a changeable world (2009: 98). Our libraries are full literary wayfinders, whose improvisational and often fallible navigations of critical flux might tell us something about the epistemological and ontological uncertainties of our own time. Here, we might look to a brief unpublished memoir sketch by Christina Stead, in which she recalls travelling from Watsons Bay to the city for school. Every day she listened to the ‘gurgling and gushing of the water round the ferry’, and ‘forced’ herself ‘to understand the sounds’. ‘I … used to think I could tell where we were anywhere in the harbour’, she writes,

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‘by the different water sounds round the beat’.1 This alternative spatiality responds not to land but to the sound of the sea, that which Stefan Helmreich, playing on the double meaning of ‘wave’, calls ‘radio ocean’ (2018: 211). As Helmreich explains, the ocean’s soundscape tunes us into ‘the back-and-forths of watery flux, to the churn of pasts and futures stirring into one another’ (211). This reminds us that in Stead’s Seven Poor Men of Sydney, the harbour is both a locus of ocean-going modernity, and an expressive force generated by a primal, fecund nonhuman world. In Dark’s Waterway, the blind child Brenda has no choice but to listen, and so like adolescent Stead, she too knows that water ‘froth had a sound’ (1990: 287). Six-year-old Brenda must constantly reorientate herself to an ever more bewildering array of phenomena. Can pink have a taste? Why does green feel the same as yellow? How can a boat’s propeller act like a wheel and a fish’s tail at the same time, when by touch those are very different things? It is clear that for Dark, who makes Brenda representative of the ideal future Australian, the child’s engagement with a poly-sensory world and constant perceptual adjustment are fundamentally good ways of being in the world. Early in Kylie Tennant’s Foveaux, blind Captain Cornish learns to navigate his home as cleverly as he did his ship on the sea, ‘through treacherous archipelagos’ (2014: 57). This sort of adaptive sensibility allows Tennant’s cast of down-and-out characters to survive in city that might otherwise beat the life out of them. Even Barnard Eldershaw, writers of the drought-stricken Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow, suggest a productive link between water, perception and orientation. It is sight of Sydney Harbour from the air that first inspires Knarf to write his book and resurrect the dead city. ‘Washed clear in that great draught of light’, Barnard Eldershaw writes at the very beginning of their novel, ‘his sealed mind had become receptive again’ (1983: 14). In each example, meaning is made by an orientation to the world that is fluid, relational and responsive. Yet, each is traversed by the possibility of obstruction or blockage: ‘But I am not sure of that’, Stead remarks of her ability to tune in to radio ocean. Brenda collapses in tears when a world meant for seeing people exhausts her, and Captain Cornish bumps into the furniture. Knarf, of course, ends up struggling with a ‘great mass’ of unwieldy paper (1983: 304).

1 ‘Overland.’ Folder 113, Box 15. Papers of Christina Stead. MS 4967. National Library of Australia.

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Recent work in literary studies has debated the efficacy of fiction in the context of what is thought to be the ‘emergent unreadability’ of climate crisis (Clark 2015: 63).2 Timothy Clark argues that the Anthropocene has exhausted certain inherited forms of writing and reading. Particularly at issue is the novel, ‘an art of sequences of human action or attention geared to a definite significant end in some fulfilled or unfilled intention’ (187). For Clark, the novel relies on individuation, immediacy and closure, forms that tally exactly with the ‘anthropocentric thinking to be overcome’ (187). But is it accurate to read the novel in this way, as a kind of imaginative limit-space? As we have seen throughout this book, novels rarely ever succeed in completely containing the forms and forces they invite into their narratives. The five writers I have read in this book all confront what were for them the most pressing questions of urban modernity. How do we ensure every citizen has access to the city’s wealth and protection from its economic troughs? How can we strengthen communal bonds without sacrificing individual liberty? How do we protect the natural environment while also ensuring that every man, woman and child has adequate food, occupation and shelter? Is it possible to atone for the sins of the past through a progressive future? Their answers to these questions are compelling reflections of the various ideological, political and cultural discourses that animated the city of Sydney at a dynamic point in its development Yet I am equally drawn to what they cannot ask, and what they leave unanswered. While Stead, Cusack, Dark, Tennant and Barnard Eldershaw all set out to find the correct distance from which to hand down a fictive judgement of Australian urban modernity, none succeeds. None finds the ‘pattern’ capable of rectifying what they see as the ‘tangle’ of modern life. Instead, each writer’s recognition of Sydney as a city ‘built on water’ results in a novel dynamically engaged with multiple viewpoints and temporalities, inviting a range of responses without closing the possibility of alternate readings. Even Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow, resolving its questions with violence and wholesale destruction, is undermined by its own convoluted form, and a publication history

2 For arguments that stress the inadequacy of traditional modes of writing and reading, see, for example, Morton (2013) and Ghosh (2016). For the inverse argument, that literary work can confront climate change through formal and aesthetic innovations that better represent the crisis and thus increase readers’ ethical response, see, for example, Trexler (2015) and Bracke (2017).

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that produced an almost uncanny doubling of the narrative, a novel full of its own textual ghosts. To borrow Walter Benjamin’s watery metaphor, these novels do not lead us directly to true North, but reflect the less linear journey of a ship allowed to follow the pull of the currents (1999: 456). In the years to come, it is likely that A Metropolis of Three Cities will be revised, discarded, or superseded. Over the two centuries of its existence, there have been many attempts to rewrite Sydney. But as Marjorie Barnard argued in 1947, blueprints and plans only tell ‘part of the story’ (26). What is needed is a means of properly engaging with a city and a world ‘in flux’ (26). Perhaps, then, journeys on the tides of Sydney’s literary past can instruct us in the sort of thinking needed to prepare for an uncertain future.

Works Cited “Australia Bushfire Smoke Travels 12,000 kms to Chile.” Dateline, 2020, 7 January. https://www.sbs.com.au/news/dateline/australia-bushfire-smoketravels-12-000-kms-to-chile. “Australian Bushfires Reach Sydney’s Suburbs.” BBC News, 2019, 12 November. https://www.bbc.com/news/world-australia-50375407. Barnard, Marjorie. Sydney: The Story of a City. Carlton: Melbourne UP, 1956. Bracke, Astrid. Climate Crisis and the 21st-Century British Novel. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2017. Benjamin, Walter. The Arcades Project. Translated by Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin. Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard UP, 1999. Bennett, Jill & Saskia Beudel. Curating Sydney: Imagining the City’s Future. Sydney: NewSouth Publishing, 2014. Brown, Chris. “Sydney Plans Ignore Problems Facing Residents to Sell City to the World.” The Sydney Morning Herald, 2018, 17 April. https://www.smh. com.au/national/nsw/sydney-plans-ignore-problems-facing-residents-to-sellcity-to-the-world-20180409-p4z8jo.html. Clark, Timothy. Ecocriticism on the Edge: The Anthropocene as Threshold Concept. New York: Bloomsbury, 2015. Dark, Eleanor. Waterway. Sydney: Collins/Angus & Robertson, 1990. Eldershaw, M. Barnard. Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow. London: Virago, 1983. Falconer, Delia. “The Radical Plan to Split Sydney into Three.” The Guardian, 2018, 10 April, https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2018/apr/10/the-rad ical-plan-to-split-sydney-into-three.

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Ghosh, Amitav. The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable. Chicago: The U of Chicago P, 2016. Greater Sydney Commission. “Greater Sydney Region Plan: A Metropolis of Three Cities—Connecting People.” 2018. https://www.greater.sydney/gre ater-sydney-region-plan. Helmreich, Stefan. “Radio Ocean.” Tidalectics: Imagining an Oceanic Worldview through Art and Science, edited by Stefanie Hessler, 211–218. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2018. Karskens, Grace. The Colony: A History of Early Sydney. Crows Nest: Allen & Unwin, 2009. Mentz, Steve. At the Bottom of Shakespeare’s Ocean. London: Continuum, 2009. Morton, Timothy. Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2013. Papers of Christina Stead, 1919–1996. MS 4967 . National Library of Australia. Tennant, Kylie. Foveaux. Adelaide: Michael Walmer, 2014. Trexler, Adam. Anthropocene Fictions: The Novel in a Time of Climate Change. Charlottesville: U of Virginia P, 2015.

Index

A Aborigines’ Progressive Association, 18 Ackland, Michael, 59 Alexander, Neal, 15 allegory, 25, 39–41, 47, 60–62, 131, 132 A Metropolis of Three Cities , 204 Anand, Mulk Raj, 141 Anthropocene, 207 architecture, 18, 85–86, 143–145, 147 apartment buildings (flats), 16, 88, 89, 151 and modernism, 53, 85, 138 and public housing, 138, 151, 153 Auchterlonie, Dorothy. See Green, Dorothy Australian Communist Party, 163

B Barbour, Judith, 48

Barnard Eldershaw, M., 13, 193 A House is Built , 170 ‘Liberty and Violence’, 171, 194 My Australia, 22, 196 Tomorrow and Tomorrow (1947), 170 Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow (1983), 10, 21, 22, 24, 25, 28, 170–173, 176, 181, 183, 186, 188, 189, 194, 196, 198, 199, 206, 207 Barnard, Marjorie, 45 The Sydney Book, 1, 9, 188, 203 Sydney: The Story of a City, 45, 180, 205 Barthes, Roland, 1 Benjamin, Andrew, 145, 150 Benjamin, Walter, 19–20, 27, 38–39, 46, 54, 59, 131, 148, 156, 159, 165, 169, 175, 178, 180, 183, 185, 193, 208 Arcades Project, The, 19–20 ‘Naples’, 144–145, 148, 150

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 M. Brayshaw, Sydney and Its Waterway in Australian Literary Modernism, Literary Urban Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-64426-0

211

212

INDEX

One-Way Street , 135 Origin of the German Trauerspiel , 26, 38 ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’, 175, 183 Bergson, Henri, 27, 126 Berman, Jessica, 143 Bevan, Scott, 7 Bewes, Timothy, 132 Black, Dorrit, 6, 29, 195 Blue cultural studies, 11 Blue Mountains, the (New South Wales), 158 Borges, Jorge Luis, 91, 98 Bowen, Elizabeth, 191 Brannigan, John, 12 Brennan, Christopher, 27, 83, 101, 111 Brown, Chris, 204 Buci-Glucksmann, Christine, 35, 39, 42, 43, 48, 60, 64, 93 Burdekin House exhibition (1929), 85

C Cadigal people, 5, 35 Caira, Diana, 142 capitalism, 10, 28, 40, 45, 46, 52, 108, 116, 122, 173, 175, 176, 178, 184 colonial capitalism, 63, 65 commercial capitalism, 8, 17 global capitalism, 6, 8, 46 and mass consumerism, 178 and ocean trade, 6, 8 Carson, Sue, 14, 120 Carter, David, 14, 177 Cash, Frank, 16 censorship, 170, 172 Chopin, Kate, 97 Churchill, Winston, 176

Clark, Timothy, 207 climate change, 15, 109, 204–205 and ‘Black Summer’ (2019–2020), 29, 205 and bushfires, 29, 65, 170, 189, 205 Cohen, Margaret, 11 Collins, David, 115, 128 colonialism, 8, 18, 36, 40, 57, 108 and Australian history, 22, 119–120 British Empire, 6, 16, 21 and capitalism. See capitalism critique, 21, 57, 129 settler colonialism, 6, 18, 27, 109 convicts, 18, 22, 109, 115, 120, 140, 146 Cook, James, 6, 11 Cooper, Melinda J., 14 Cunneen, Rachel, 198 Cusack, Dymphna, 146 Jungfrau, 7, 26–27, 71–102

D Dalziell, Tanya, 13, 17, 181 Dark, Eleanor, 172 The Little Company, 132 No Barrier, 119 The Timeless Land, 115 Waterway, 7, 21, 23, 27, 105–132, 206 Darwin, Charles, 43, 44 Day of Mourning, 18 de Certeau, Michel, 163 de Maistre, Roy, 6 Demolition Books, the, 135–136, 144 Dick, Margaret, 147 Doyle, Sue, 38, 136, 137, 146 drought, 24–25, 169, 170, 172–189, 192, 196 Dunne, J.W., 26, 73, 79, 90–92, 98 Dupain, Max, 17

INDEX

213

E Eddington, Arthur, 26, 72, 73, 79, 81, 93–94, 98 Edwards, Deborah, 6, 76 Einstein, Albert, 3, 72, 73 Eldershaw, Flora, 152 Eliot, George, 143 Eliot, T.S., 91 Ellis, Steve, 24, 28, 171 environmental conservation, 25, 109, 171, 194 Eora people, 5, 115 Esty, Jed, 23, 28 eugenics, 110–111

H Haussmann, Georges-Eugéne, Baron, 16, 19 Haynes, Roslyn, 173 Helmreich, Stefan, 206 Home, The, 17, 75, 76, 117 Homer, 98 Hurley, Frank, 18 hydro-criticism, 11–12

F Falconer, Delia, 203–205 Federation, 38 Feinsod, Harris, 12 Ferguson, William, 18 First Fleet, the, 6, 109, 120 Fitzgerald, J.D. ‘Jack’, 15–16 Foley, Gary, 204 Forster, E.M., 171 Franck, Karen A., 161 Franklin, Miles, 146

J Jeans, James, 26, 79 The Mysterious Universe, 73, 83, 97, 98 Jindyworobaks, the, 14 Joyce, James, 12–14, 39

G Gai-mariagal people, 5 Gap, the, 55, 59, 60, 97, 161 gender, 10, 14, 18, 21, 107, 113 Gibson, Ross, 108, 120, 121 Giles, Paul, 14 Great Depression, the, 18, 27, 75, 141, 148, 157–158, 162, 171, 187, 193 Greater Sydney Commission, the, 203 Green, Dorothy, 44 Green, H.M., 37 Greycliffe disaster, 126, 131

I Illich, Ivan, 3 Ingamells, Rex, 14 Inglis Moore, T., 142

K Keating, Christopher, 138–139, 151 Klee, Paul, 175 Koestler, Arthur, 187 Koolhaas, Rem, 163 Kropotkin, Peter, 98 L L¯acis, Asja, 27, 144–145, 149 Lamond, Julieanne, 171 Lawrence, D.H., 27, 79–81, 111–112, 121 Fantasia of the Unconscious , 80–81, 121 Le Corbusier, 28, 138, 154 Lefebvre, Henri, 163 Lehmann, Rosamond, 75 Levine, Caroline, 10, 21, 132

214

INDEX

Lindsay, Jack, 13 London, Jack, 141 London, U.K., 3, 12, 13, 76, 99, 173

M MacKay, Marina, 28 Mackenzie, Michael, 59 Macquarie, Lachlan, 119 MacQueen, Humphrey, 17 Marx, Karl, 42–43, 178 Marxism, 26, 41, 43, 56, 61, 63, 193, 194 Mellor, Leo, 28, 141, 189, 195 Mentz, Steve, 11, 205 Miller, Tyrus, 28, 123 Mimmocchi, Denise, 6, 76 modernism, 3, 28, 37, 38, 41, 67, 87, 90, 100–101, 170 in art, 6, 12, 13, 17, 26, 77, 85, 124 Australian, 6, 12, 13, 29, 57, 67 in Australian literary criticism, 14 documentary modernism, 142, 144 intermodernism, 141 late modernism, 28, 123 and the ocean, 11–12 reactions against, 100 regional modernism, 14–15 transnational modernism, 12 modernity, 5, 20, 36, 46–48, 127 cosmopolitanism, 13, 15, 48, 78, 87, 101 ideology of progress, 10, 16, 20, 25, 28, 40, 66, 100, 101, 132, 138 and literary culture, 37–38, 76–77, 101, 184–185 settler colonial, 27, 109 transnational modernity, 11, 14, 48, 189 Modjeska, Drusilla, 78, 106, 199

Moore, Nicole, 14, 78–79, 182 Moran, James, 15 Morrison, Fiona, 13, 14, 41, 99 Mumford, Lewis, 172, 180, 182, 183

N Nietzsche, Friedrich, 44, 82

O O’Brien, Flann, 91 Orwell, George, 141, 176, 185, 186

P pacificism, 176 Pacific Ocean, the, 9, 12, 15, 65, 164, 205 Palmer, Nettie, 13 Paris, France, 3, 16, 19, 178 Patten, Jack, 18 Phillip, Arthur, 5, 6, 8, 115, 139, 204 physics, 48, 72, 73, 83 and relativity, 3, 72, 80 Piddington, Arthur, 111 Piddington, Marion, 111 Piette, Adam, 194 porosity, 144, 148, 161 poverty, 8, 21, 42, 45, 46, 53, 54, 115, 137, 138, 164 slums, 8, 21, 38, 53, 85, 139, 153, 163 and unemployment, 115 Preston, Margaret, 17 Priestley, J.B., 92 Proctor, Thea, 17, 85 Purvis, Tom, 1–3

R race, 10, 57, 113 racism, 23, 57, 129

INDEX

Read, Herbert, 194 religion, 25, 45, 54, 73, 79, 93, 154 Christianity, 77 Rhys, Jean, 75 Rifkind, Candida, 141, 142 Roberts, Hera, 17, 85 Roe, Jill, 188 Rooney, Brigid, 14, 109, 129

S Saint-Amour, Paul K., 29, 171, 172, 175, 197 Saunders, Ian, 198 science, 25–27, 52, 53, 57, 66, 79 scientific idealism, 73, 77 Sesquicentenary celebrations, 1–3, 17–18, 109, 138, 146 Shakespeare, William, 11, 191 Shaw, George Bernard, 24, 176, 193 Smith, Ellen, 14 Smith, Grace Cossington, 6, 29, 195 speculative fiction, 171 speech (narrative technique), 142 Spender, Steven, 195 Stavrides, Stavros, 148 Stead, Christina, 9, 75, 153, 155, 203 For Love Alone, 99 Ocean of Story, 40 Seven Poor Men of Sydney, 3, 7, 12, 21, 23, 25, 26, 35–67, 79, 85, 97, 101, 161, 163, 199, 206 Stead, David G., 40 Stein, Gertrude, 13 Stephensen, P.R., 111 Stevens, Quentin, 149 Strang, Veronica, 144 surrealism, 39, 185 Sydney and the 1900 Plague, 135 Aboriginal Sydney, 6, 18, 62, 115, 203, 204

215

Art Gallery of New South Wales, 57, 116, 119 AWA Tower, 195 beaches, 26, 75, 85, 107, 127, 189 Botanic Gardens, the, 85, 93, 120, 195 Botany Bay, 5, 6 Careel House, 86–88 Central Station, 172, 178, 179 Chippendale, 136 Circular Quay, 8, 9, 47, 53, 116 Cremorne, 8 Darlinghurst, 8, 141, 182 Domain, the, 116 Drummoyne, 8 Flemington, 180 Frog Hollow, 140 Gladesville Mental Hospital, 61 Greater Sydney, 5, 204 Hyde Park, 85, 116 Kings Cross, 95, 172, 174, 181, 185, 198 Lake Burragorang, 205 Lane Cove National Park, 205 Macarthur, 203 Macquarie Place, 53, 118–122 Macquarie Street, 85, 116, 195 Mosman, 8 and multiculturalism, 158 North Head, 5, 13 North Sydney, 43, 55 Paddy’s Market, 47 Parliament House, 195 Parramatta, 203 Penrith, 203 Pitt Street, 45, 46 Queen’s Square, 117 Redfern, 180 Rookwood Cemetery, 180 South Head, 8, 22, 23, 35–36, 40, 43, 58, 130

216

INDEX

State Library of New South Wales, 52 suburbs, 5, 8, 29, 43, 55, 61, 180, 196, 205 Surry Hills, 137–139, 151, 158 Watsons Bay, 106, 107, 109, 122, 126, 131 Waverley Cemetery, 164 William street, 174, 181, 182, 193 Sydney Harbour, 5–6, 11, 41, 55, 64 in Aboriginal history, 6, 18, 115, 123 and anthropogenic climate change, 15 and drowning, 41, 97, 130 ecology of, 27 and first contact, 6, 10, 27 and industry, 5, 6, 16, 119 Lane Cove River, 5, 55 Middle Head, 8, 65 Parramatta River, 5, 55, 61, 128 and pollution, 8, 41, 47, 114, 127 Tank Stream, the, 26, 41–55, 59, 65 wetlands, 95 Sydney Harbour Bridge, 3, 16, 17, 23, 195 building of, 16, 18, 28 commentary on, 16 opening of, 16 T Tennant, Kylie, 76 The Battlers , 141 Foveaux, 7, 8, 20, 21, 23, 27, 117, 135–165, 206 ‘Pioneering Still Goes On’, 152 Turnbull, Lucy, 203 U University of Sydney, the, 48, 85 urbanisation, 19, 42, 138, 149

and demolition, 16, 27, 117, 136, 137, 158 and urban planning, 27, 28, 117, 136, 143, 151, 154 Ure Smith, Sydney, 9 V Vienna, 138, 153 vitalism, 94, 110–111, 129 W Wangal people, 5 water and aesthetics, 6, 9, 28, 39, 40, 42, 59, 77, 100, 108, 142 and narrative form, 11, 29, 132 urban infrastructure, 8, 27, 139 Wells, H.G., 24, 91, 171, 173, 176, 194 The Shape of Things to Come (1933), 194 White, John, 6 White, Patrick, 199 Whittier-Ferguson, John, 186 Woolf, Virginia, 12 ‘Docks of London’, 13 Woolloomooloo, 8, 88 World War I, 38, 138, 141 World War II, 189, 194, 199 and aerial bombardment, 24, 170, 189 anticipation of, 25 the Blitz, 173, 195 and bombing of Darwin, 172 and the fall of Singapore, 188 Japanese submarine attack on Sydney Harbour, 172, 188 Sydney blackouts, 190 Wright, Judith, 101 Y Yeats, W.B., 59