Cirrus@Austlit

'In the opening scene of Eleanor Dark’s novel Waterway (1938), Oliver Denning drives over Sydney’s South Head through the dawn, looking out over the red roofs of Watsons Bay to the harbour below. Oliver’s elevated perspective and physical distance allow him to offer readers a holistic assessment of Sydney, one hundred and fifty years after white settlement. As a doctor, Oliver relies on medical metaphors for his description, diagnosing the city as a germinating disease, ‘the growth of whose parent cells had fastened upon the land’ in 1788 (11). Struggling to reconcile with its cost—a land ‘violated,’ a people decimated—Denning finds himself wishing to ‘annihilate the city’ (12, 11). As the scene continues, however, the doctor forces himself to reconfirm his connection to the present place and time, as Dark shifts to second person to enfold the reader in a vision of radical community:

You were one of the red roofs, and all about you, on this shore and on the opposite shore, from Balgowah to Parramatta, were your neighbours, the other red roofs … He was very well pleased that it should be so. … 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 of which you yourself are another part, and whose ending neither you nor they will see. (12-13)