Cirrus@Austlit

Vance Palmer's The Passage (1930) and Eleanor Dark's Lantana Lane (1959) bracket the period during which the narrow coastal strip north of Brisbane from the Pumicestone Passage to the Noosa River was being transformed economically and culturally into what we know today as the Sunshine Coast. In the 1920s and 1950s respectively, Palmer and Dark participated in changing the region, and as established writers they reflected upon that metamorphosis in literary works that reached a national audience at a time when Brisbane's near north coast was off the beaten track for professional writers. But for millennia prior to colonisation, this area had sustained a vibrant economy and culture centred on bunyas from the mountains and seafood from the coast. By the late nineteenth century, this vast economic and cultural network had been radically disrupted by the incursions of timber-getters and pastoralists, and many of the traditional owners who had survived the frontier wars had been removed. While the inscription of a new identity on the region in the twentieth century was driven by the real estate speculators who coined the name ‘Sunshine Coast’, Palmer in The Passage and Dark in Lantana Lane share a more cooperative, sustainable, egalitarian and anti-imperialist vision for the region, with some indirect and ambiguous debts to its Aboriginal past.

Serendipity has always played a role in research, and today the availability of digitised newspapers through Trove offers new opportunities for chance discoveries. A couple of years ago, Glenn R. Cooke — then Research Curator of Queensland Heritage at the Queensland Art Gallery — referred me to a snippet from The Queenslander of 15 October 1892, where the Melbourne correspondent writes:

My attention was recently drawn to ‘Drifting’, a novel by a Queensland lady who uses the nom de plume of ‘Ellerton Gay.’ She lived, I believe, for eighteen years in Toowoomba, and is the wife of Mr. J. Watts-Grimes, who is well known in squatting circles. She has lived in England six years, and there she has embalmed her memories of the Queensland which is so dear to her. ‘Drifting’ is much admired here.

‘What's in a name?’ asks the title of one of Ellerton Gay's short stories. The pseudonym, which was evidently an open secret in her lifetime, has subsequently obscured ‘Ellerton Gay’ and her creator, Emma Watts Grimes, from the view of literary historians: Patrick Buckridge and I, for example, overlooked her in our historical survey of literature in Queensland, By the book (2007). Until very recently, the AustLit Database listed her as male, with no further biographical details, and — despite its recent facsimile republication of her novel, Drifting under the Southern Cross (1890) — the British Library fails to make the link between Ellerton Gay and Emma Watts Grimes in its catalogue entry. The reissue of this novel, justifiably ‘much admired’ in its own time, suggests that its elusive author is worth a reappraisal. Since Ellerton Gay's oeuvre draws extensively on the lived experience of Emma Watts Grimes and her extended family, this article provides a biographical sketch before discussing the fictional works.' (Publication abstract)

'The themes of cultural dislocation and the struggle to feel ‘at home’ in a new land figure prominently in Australian literature, and considerable critical attention has been devoted to the distinctive articulations of these preoccupations by well-known writers of Irish birth or descent, such as Victor Daley, Bernard O'Dowd and John O'Brien. Queensland's Irish writers, however, have been largely forgotten or overlooked — both individually and as a group.' (Publication summary)

'Queensland is known in the Australian imagination as the frontier, a place of barren land and wild politics – and, conversely, as Australia's playground, with its sub-tropical weather, beaches and natural wonders. It's a place that has long had an image of difference to the rest of the country, both within and without its borders, an image based in the reality of a different sense of distance, a different apprehension of time, different architecture.'

'By the Book presents a wide-ranging history of the literature of Queensland from European settlement to the present day, a period of immense change for this state. The state is broken up into geographic regions, with each chapter building a rich sense of the regional specificity of its literary culture.'

'Thematic chapters are also included, covering travel writing, writing for children, and indigenous writing. By the Book also covers the role of institutions such as schools, public libraries, the press and publishers in shaping the writing and reading of books in Queensland.' (Source: ABC shop website)

'Eleanor Dark's years in Montville represent an unusual moment in the history of Queensland literature: it was one oft he rare instances, until recent times, of an established professional writer moving to Queensland and pursuing her career in a small rural community. Since the 1980s, the Sunshine Coast and its hinterland have become something of a mecca for writers. None of the later anivals, however, has pursued Dark's project of viewing the wider world from the hinterland. In Lantana Lane she intertwines meticulous observation of local life, in which she participated as a farmer, with wider cultural and political concerns. She transforms the apparently inauspicious location of the hinterland into a vantage point from which to reflect on modes of production, from the agricultural to the literary.' (Introduction)