Note:

As Melinda J. Cooper.

Issue Details: First known date: 2017... 2017 ‘This Long and Shining Finger of the Sea Itself’ : Sydney Harbour and Regional Cosmopolitanism in Eleanor Dark’s Waterway
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'In Eleanor Dark’s novel Waterway (1938), Professor Channon is prompted by the ominous international headline ‘Failure of Peace Talks’ to imagine the world from a global perspective (120). Channon feels himself metaphorically ‘lifted away from the earth … seeing it from an incredible distance, and with an incredible, an all-embracing comprehension’ (119-20). This move outward from a located perspective to ‘a more detached overview of a wider global space’ signifies a cosmopolitan viewpoint, ‘in which the viewing subject rises above the placebound attachments of the nation-state to take the measure of the world as a wider totality’ (Hegglund 8-9). Yet even this global view is mediated by Channon’s position from within ‘a great island continent alone in its south sea’ (121). Gazing from a ‘vast distance,’ he views Europe as ‘the patches where parasitic man had lived longest and most densely,’ and from which humankind ‘went out to infect fresh lands’ (120). This description of old world Europe as ‘parasitic’ provides a glimpse of resistant nationalism, reflecting Channon’s location within one of the ‘fresh lands’ affected by colonisation. Channon is ultimately unable to sustain a ‘Godlike’ perspective in this scene, desiring ‘nothing but to return’ to local place (121). Although his view initially ‘vaults beyond the bounds of national affiliation’ (Alexander and Moran 4), this move outward does not ‘nullify an affective attachment to the more grounded locations of human attachment’ (Hegglund 20). Channon’s return to the ‘shabby home … of his own humanity’ brings a renewed sense of connection to ‘the sun-warmed rail of the gate’ and ‘the faint breeze [which] ruffled the hair back from his forehead’ (122).' (Introduction)

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    y separately published work icon JASAL Empire/Dissent vol. 17 no. 1 2017 12713236 2017 periodical issue

    'Working with the archives of the North American frontier, non-Indigenous historian Richard White noted in 1997: ‘A large chunk of our early documents … are conversations between people who do not completely understand each other. We are connoisseurs of misreadings’ (93). White’s couching remains provocative for literary scholars and writers working in settler cultures—what does it mean to be skilled at misreading? What misreadings does a culture rely on, perpetuate? Is this a way to describe the mechanisms of denial at work in settler overwriting, re-interpreting and rhetoricising of Indigenous points of view and testimony, in so far as they are acknowledged in settler culture? Who is the ‘we’ here, more precisely; who is collected in White’s use of ‘our’?' (Nicole Moore : Editorial introduction)

    2017
Last amended 12 Mar 2019 07:51:09
https://openjournals.library.sydney.edu.au/index.php/JASAL/article/view/11791/11489 ‘This Long and Shining Finger of the Sea Itself’ : Sydney Harbour and Regional Cosmopolitanism in Eleanor Dark’s Waterwaysmall AustLit logo JASAL
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