Cirrus@Austlit

'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)