The Timeless Land by Eleanor Dark.
DESCRIPTION: Hardback with Dust Jacket: 499 pages. Publisher: The Macmillan Company; (1941). This is a richly colorful story of the first five years of English settlement in Australia, and of the black people whose life and culture and natural gaiety were so cruelly destroyed in that short time. The story is a dramatic one, eloquently told. The few boatloads of convicts who land in Sydney Harbor in 1788 make poor pioneer stock indeed. That they survive at all is due to the courage and wisdom of their Captain Phillips. His story is told here, as is that of a fictional character, Andrew prentice, a red-headed convict who escapes, takes a native wife, and flourishes with her in the wilds while his fellow English back at the settlement are near starvation.
Parallel to the slow establishment of the white colony runs the sad history of the black men's demoralization, personified in Bellilong, an historical figure and a leader in his tribe, who develops a fatal friendliness toward the English. A visit to London completes his undoing, and symbolizes the coming degeneracy of his whole race. An excellent story and fresh background make this Mrs. Dark's most ambitious and important novel. The author Eleanor Dark was born and educated in Sydney. The daughter of an important Australian writer Dowell O’Reilly, she lives in Katoomba, New South Wales.
CONDITION: Dust Jacket is worn and has missing parts, but repaired, yellowing spots on first and last pages, otherwise clean and in good condition.
PLEASE SEE IMAGES BELOW FOR JACKET DESCRIPTION(S) AND FOR PAGES OF PICTURES FROM INSIDE OF BOOK.
PLEASE SEE PUBLISHER, PROFESSIONAL, AND READER REVIEWS BELOW.
REVIEW: Fictional account of the first settlement on Sydney, Australia. Set in 1788 this is the story of the first five years of the English ( penal ) settlement in Australia and of the black people whose life and culture were so cruelly destroyed in that short time. First published in 1941, this is a classic novel of the early settlement of Australia and the conflict between the Aborigines and the white settlers. Includes a glossary of aboriginal words and phrases.
REVIEW: When Europeans settled the continent of Australia, they not only conquered a new space, they also introduced a new sense of time. In her popular novel of early colonial life, “The Timeless Land”, Eleanor Dark presents this drama, the coming of time to a timeless land, as the epochal event of early Australian history. ‘Here’, she writes, of the land that awaited the First Fleet, ‘life was marooned, and time, like a slowly turning wheel, was only night and day, night and day, summer and winter, birth and death, the ebb and swell of tides.’ Into this timeless land come the British colonists with their dreams of material progress, their constant busyness, their timetables and routines. To them, Australia is a baffling continent, a land where the seasons are reversed, where the unchanging foliage offers no calendar of seasonal change.
The newcomers are equally strange in the eyes of the native people, ‘always moving, always going hurriedly from one place to another, always dragging things about, building, struggling, making a labor of their life.’ The contrast between the ways of life of Aboriginal and European peoples “was not a contrast between a timeless and a time-based culture. Time is a dimension of social life in all cultures. Aborigines grounded their lives in a belief in the Dreamtime, an ancient, heroic age of spirit-beings. Aboriginal time was continuous, or perhaps cyclical, rather than linear. Events could recur, dead people could live again, present places could give access to past deeds. Concepts which the European conquerors of Australia, bluff naval men and irreligious convicts, were poorly equipped to understand.
The aborigines were more alert to the subtle changes in foliage, wind direction, tidal movement and bird migration that marked the passage of the year. The desert people of the Centre, for example, had names for eight or nine seasons, while the coastal people of Arnhem Land might refer to the coincidence of several seasonal conditions, the direction of the wind, temperature, cloud formations, the blossoming of flowers, to pinpoint an event. However the fate of the Aborigines and their lifestyle and orientations was to collide with a people whose conceptions of time had lately undergone a mighty revolution, and who were seized with an ambition to subject the whole world to the rule of the clock.
REVIEW: The story of the early settlement of Australia is a story of hardship, mutiny, savagery and danger. And behind the veneer of British civilization lay the baffling presence of Australia itself, a timeless land that shared with England "not even its seasons or its stars”. The main characters in this story are true to history and often their actual words are quoted.
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