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Colonial Australian Popular Fiction Digital Archive
y separately published work icon The Desert Horizon single work   novel  
Issue Details: First known date: 1923... 1923 The Desert Horizon
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Roslynn Haynes comments: 'The Desert Horizon and its sequel Daimon closely mirror Watson's own inner struggle to come to terms with the desert as a metaphysical experience. The two central figures, Martin O'Brian (who came to the desert as a child of eight and identifies wholly with it) and his English wife Maggie (who arrived in Australia as a young woman and finds it appalling) re-enact in their vexed relationship the inner turmoil of Watson's alternating fascination with and revulsion from the land.' Roslynn Haynes, 'Dying of Landscape: E.L. Grant Watson and the Australian Desert', Australian Literary Studies 19.1 (1999): 35).

Notes

  • E. Morris Miller's Australian Literature from its Beginnings to 1935 (1940): 728-729 comments: 'The topography of The Desert Horizon, 1923, and its sequel, Daimon, 1925, covers the far north-west of Western Australia, with contrasting changes to Perth and its environs. These novels, written in narrative form, are a psychological study of the influence of wide silent spaces upon human contacts. Detailing in The Desert Horizon how Martin O'Brien from childhood came under the spell of the desert lands and their far-flung horizons. Watson makes of him a man at one with their solitude. He cannot cut himself apart. After marriage at Perth with the daughter of a newly-arrived immigrant, he sets himself the task of winning a station whose boundaries are the desert's limits. The tragic story of his married life is realistically recorded in Daimon. The wife, a city girl, bravely struggles to adapt herself to lands lying empty under the stars. She is afflicted by a morbid consciousness of unseen ghostly presences to which she reacts as though they were the dispensations of the devil. The husband, attuned to his environment through interest and work, fails to grasp the impending alienation of his partner in life, who craves for sex companionship. The toll of the desert upon white womanhood in Watson's novels was to be contrasted later in Katherine Susannah Pritchard's Coonardoo with the toll exacted upon white men who lived under the constant solicitation of attractive black women. In sheer desperation Martin yields to his wife's desire; he gets rid of his station and becomes a wheat farmer by the sea. But the call of the desert is in his blood, even in his middle 'sixties. He goes back and loses himself in the unknown. In the end his wife seeks him, and her wanderings have their counterpart in the desolation of 'Coonardoo'.

    This is not the place to make a psychological valuation of Watson's viewpoint and conclusions. His general position is that city-bred women are not suitable for outback life in the far desert lands of Western Australia. His interpretation of the sex life of the woman he created in the character of Maggie O'Brien is open to serious question. But admitting its possibility, he has presented her relations with his paramour in an intensely dramatic pose, some portions of which might be regarded as a soliloquy in action. In these two novels he has daringly laid bare, in words carrying the spell of magic, what he believes to be the spiritual meaning of the desert. Others may assert that he has read into Australian conditions his own anthropological theories.'

  • Peter Cowan notes that 'There is a difference in the text between the N. Y. and London editions. First names of some characters are also altered, and the spelling O'Brian in Cape edition is O'Brien in N. Y. ' ('E. L. Grant Watson and Western Australia: A Concern for Landscape', Westerly (March 1980): 58).
  • Prequel to Daimon.

Publication Details of Only Known VersionEarliest 2 Known Versions of

    • New York (City), New York (State),
      c
      United States of America (USA),
      c
      Americas,
      :
      Knopf ,
      1923 .
      image of person or book cover 5184915946438526139.jpg
      Colonial Australian Popular Fiction Digital Archive
      Extent: 302p.
Alternative title: Vid öknens rand
Language: Swedish
    • Stockholm,
      c
      Sweden,
      c
      Scandinavia, Western Europe, Europe,
      :
      Norstedt ,
      1923 .
      Extent: 322p.

Works about this Work

'Did He Want to Mix and Mate with this Man?' : Mateship, Modernism and Homoerotic Primitivism Damien Barlow , 2012 single work criticism
— Appears in: Australian Literary Studies , May vol. 27 no. 1 2012; (p. 18-32)
'It Was to Have Been my Best Book' : Dorothy Green and E. L. Grant Watson Suzanne Falkiner , 2010 single work criticism
— Appears in: JASAL , no. 10 2010;
'When literary critic Dorothy Green died in 1991, those in her immediate circle were mystified to learn that little trace of the biography of English writer E. L. Grant Watson, which she was known to have been researching for some twenty years, had been found among her papers. This article examines the reasons why.' (Author's abstract)
Dying of Landscape: E.L. Grant Watson and the Australian Desert Roslynn D. Haynes , 1999 single work criticism
— Appears in: Australian Literary Studies , May vol. 19 no. 1 1999; (p. 32-43)
'Some Mystical Affinity': E.L. Grant Watson and the Australian Desert Roslynn D. Haynes , 1998 single work criticism biography
— Appears in: Land and Identity : Proceedings of the 1997 Conference Held at The University of New England Armidale New South Wales 27-30 September 1997 1998; (p. 168-173)
Strange Bedfellows: Homo-Eroticism and Landscape in Two Bush Novels from the 1920s Tim Suttor , 1998 single work criticism
— Appears in: Land and Identity : Proceedings of the 1997 Conference Held at The University of New England Armidale New South Wales 27-30 September 1997 1998; (p. 105-109)
'It Was to Have Been my Best Book' : Dorothy Green and E. L. Grant Watson Suzanne Falkiner , 2010 single work criticism
— Appears in: JASAL , no. 10 2010;
'When literary critic Dorothy Green died in 1991, those in her immediate circle were mystified to learn that little trace of the biography of English writer E. L. Grant Watson, which she was known to have been researching for some twenty years, had been found among her papers. This article examines the reasons why.' (Author's abstract)
'Did He Want to Mix and Mate with this Man?' : Mateship, Modernism and Homoerotic Primitivism Damien Barlow , 2012 single work criticism
— Appears in: Australian Literary Studies , May vol. 27 no. 1 2012; (p. 18-32)
E.L. Grant Watson and Western Australia : A Concern for Landscape Peter Cowan , 1980 single work criticism
— Appears in: Westerly , March vol. 25 no. 1 1980; (p. 39-58)
The Daimon and the Fringe-Dweller : The Novels of Grant Watson Dorothy Green , 1971 single work criticism
— Appears in: Meanjin Quarterly , Spring vol. 30 no. 3 1971; (p. 277-293)
Strange Bedfellows: Homo-Eroticism and Landscape in Two Bush Novels from the 1920s Tim Suttor , 1998 single work criticism
— Appears in: Land and Identity : Proceedings of the 1997 Conference Held at The University of New England Armidale New South Wales 27-30 September 1997 1998; (p. 105-109)
Last amended 2 Sep 2016 11:53:42
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