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The Timeless Land #2
Storm of time
Sydney Cove, 1799, and three years since Governor Phillip departed. Against a background of continuing convict settlement, hunger, rebellion and the terrifying force of a barely understood land, the saga of Ellen Prentice and the Mannion family continues. Stephen Mannion marries the lovely Conor Moore and brings her back for Ellen to serve. Johnny Prentice goes bush - and re-emerges for one last confrontation with his old master ...
590 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1948
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128 people want to read
About the author
Eleanor Dark
16 books17 followersEleanor Dark (1901 - 1985) was an Australian author, most known for her historical novel The Timeless Land (1941), which became a bestseller in Australia and the USA.
Dark was born on 26 August 1901 at Croydon, Sydney, second of three children of Sydney-born parents Dowell O’Reilly, schoolteacher and author, and his wife Eleanor Grace, née McCulloch, who died in 1914 after an unhappy marriage and a period of ill health. Small, dark and elfin, 'Pixie', as she was known to her family, attended several private schools before boarding at Redlands, Neutral Bay, from 1916 to 1920.
Although Pixie had written verse from the age of 7, as the family’s finances grew tighter her hopes of university and a writing career faded. After attending Stott & Hoare’s Business College, she worked as a stenographer for a firm of solicitors, Makinson, Plunkett & d’Apice, for eighteen months. She married Eric Payten Dark, a medical practitioner and a widower with an infant son, John, on 1 February 1922 at St Matthias’s Church of England, Paddington. Eric and Eleanor shared many interests: literature, history, tennis, bushwalking, mountain-climbing and gardening. Next year they moved to Katoomba. In the relative isolation of the Blue Mountains she resumed writing. Eric enthusiastically encouraged her. They were absorbed in each other; John moved back and forth between them and his mother’s family and later boarded at Sydney Grammar School, visiting the Darks for occasional weekends. Their son Michael was born in 1929; Eleanor was a devoted mother to him.
Dark used the pseudonyms 'P. O’R.' and 'Patricia O’Rane' for the verse which she wrote in the 1920s and early 1930s. It was published in Australia by journals including the Triad, Bulletin and Woman’s Mirror, but was not very significant. Her short stories were also published in these journals and in Motoring News, Home and Ink.
She wrote her ten novels between the 1930s and 1950s. Seven had contemporary themes, often utilising the techniques of modernism, exploring contemporary relationships and politics. Her other three novels - beginning with The Timeless Land - formed an historical trilogy and were her most popular and best-selling works.
Both Eleanor and Eric were openly leftist in their views throughout a period when Australia was increasingly conservative. They were monitored by the government during the "Red scare" of the 1940s and 1950s, for fear they were members of the Communist Party (they weren't).
Dark largely abandoned writing after 1960. Although she worked on manuscript novels and plays, she lost interest due to a combination of low sales and the changing tastes of the public. In the late 1970s, Dark was awarded an Order of Australia medal, and her books were gradually republished in the 1980s as a new wave of artists and feminists discovered her writings. By this time, she was ill, and died in 1985 in hospital.
Dark was born on 26 August 1901 at Croydon, Sydney, second of three children of Sydney-born parents Dowell O’Reilly, schoolteacher and author, and his wife Eleanor Grace, née McCulloch, who died in 1914 after an unhappy marriage and a period of ill health. Small, dark and elfin, 'Pixie', as she was known to her family, attended several private schools before boarding at Redlands, Neutral Bay, from 1916 to 1920.
Although Pixie had written verse from the age of 7, as the family’s finances grew tighter her hopes of university and a writing career faded. After attending Stott & Hoare’s Business College, she worked as a stenographer for a firm of solicitors, Makinson, Plunkett & d’Apice, for eighteen months. She married Eric Payten Dark, a medical practitioner and a widower with an infant son, John, on 1 February 1922 at St Matthias’s Church of England, Paddington. Eric and Eleanor shared many interests: literature, history, tennis, bushwalking, mountain-climbing and gardening. Next year they moved to Katoomba. In the relative isolation of the Blue Mountains she resumed writing. Eric enthusiastically encouraged her. They were absorbed in each other; John moved back and forth between them and his mother’s family and later boarded at Sydney Grammar School, visiting the Darks for occasional weekends. Their son Michael was born in 1929; Eleanor was a devoted mother to him.
Dark used the pseudonyms 'P. O’R.' and 'Patricia O’Rane' for the verse which she wrote in the 1920s and early 1930s. It was published in Australia by journals including the Triad, Bulletin and Woman’s Mirror, but was not very significant. Her short stories were also published in these journals and in Motoring News, Home and Ink.
She wrote her ten novels between the 1930s and 1950s. Seven had contemporary themes, often utilising the techniques of modernism, exploring contemporary relationships and politics. Her other three novels - beginning with The Timeless Land - formed an historical trilogy and were her most popular and best-selling works.
Both Eleanor and Eric were openly leftist in their views throughout a period when Australia was increasingly conservative. They were monitored by the government during the "Red scare" of the 1940s and 1950s, for fear they were members of the Communist Party (they weren't).
Dark largely abandoned writing after 1960. Although she worked on manuscript novels and plays, she lost interest due to a combination of low sales and the changing tastes of the public. In the late 1970s, Dark was awarded an Order of Australia medal, and her books were gradually republished in the 1980s as a new wave of artists and feminists discovered her writings. By this time, she was ill, and died in 1985 in hospital.
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Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews
June 17, 2017
An engrossing read, this instalment in Dark's trilogy moves focus to the differentiating class and power struggles in the colony: between the governors and the smaller settlers on the one hand, and the military and large landowners on the other. This plays out, through Dark's incisive analysis, as a feud between a pastoral, welfare capitalism and a naked, expansionist, monopoly capitalism. Indigenous characters recede to the sidelines, appearing peripherally through colonists eyes.
Dark's strength lies in her depiction of the inner life of key characters: the governors; and her created settler family. In Conor Mannion, she creates a POV character for herself and her audience: an outsider, wealthy and white, stricken by conscience and curiosity, but paralysed into inaction, destined to be a witness rather than a participant. Conor's helplessness mirrors our own, as Dark looks unflinchingly at the slavery intrinsic to the penal colony, and to the accumulation of wealth that is built upon its labour.
In some ways, the relative paucity of Indigenous views was less unsettling than Dark's Timeless Land recreation of a society she didn't entirely understand, but the book is much weaker for their absence, and as I wrote in my review of that book, this is a damned if you do, damned if you don't situation for her given when she wrote and the perspective she had. I deliberately read this book in close proximity to Paul Irish's Hidden in Plain View: The Aboriginal People of Coastal Sydney. So the decision to simply disregard Aboriginal viewpoints on the colony was in sharp historical context for me: both why Dark downplays them, and how unrealistic this was as a representation of life.
Perhaps worse is her creation of Johnny/Djonni, a character she portrays as straddling Aboriginal and colonist worlds. Johnny represents for Dark something of the land itself, clearly, and maybe a future beyond conflict. The problem is that Johnny's Aboriginal influences are seen only as absences of white values - a wildness, impetuosity, and aversion to routine: never as values, skills, knowledge that is sustaining. She describes Johnny as shocked to encounter French, having assumed there was only a black and a white language - when any Aboriginal group living in the Hawkesbury region at this time would have used multiple languages on a daily basis. Johnny speaks little, and uses sign language, even though he is fluent in Aboriginal languages (and actually, having deserted the colony at 8, would have almost certainly retained good English, but language development may have been less understood in the 40s, so I'll forgive that one). Johnny ends up representing some pretty awful racist stereotypes, without being explicit about Aboriginal culture.
I also managed some discomfort over Dark's approach to the power and sex relations in the colony. Both Ellen and Dilboong are expected to have sex with the men who control their lives, and Dark is rank about the power relations of sexuality. However, both women are portrayed as complying willingly - almost uncaringly - with this situation. Ellen is overtly represented as finding pleasure in this kind of sex, and Dilboong is portrayed as being willing to do anything to please. Now, I've no doubt that many women did find pleasure, power, solace in transactional sex in the colony, however, the complete absence of rape, trauma or fear in the narrative feels lop-sided, and missing a big chunk of the colonial experience.
If all this sounds too critical for four stars, well the point is that Dark's narrative gives plenty to chew over, and hence to criticise. Dark has her protagonists curiosity in how and why things work, in class and power, in race and Country, in how things may have worked out differently. Her portrayal of Bligh, in particular, is masterful, a man both Grand and petty, steely willed and narrow focused, ethical within such a narrow band as to do as much harm as good. His actions never feel forced, and through her portrayal of the individuals, Dark never ceases to give them agency, while weaving a tale of forces greater than individuals to control. Bligh is balanced by the Irish idealist Finn, who could simply have been a cut-out convict hero, but whose flaws and shortsightedness are just as frustratingly impairing as Bligh's formalism is. The pure Calvinism of her settler class: Macarther and his ilk - whose idea of righteousness is indistinguishable from wealth, status, clean and prosperous families, and hence justifies absolutely the slave labour, physical abuse, and most of all, theft of Aboriginal land that underpins their success is a triumph.
The book is flawed, and should be read alongside Anne Summers, and Paul Irish, to balance the history, but it is a fun, insightful and thought-provoking read worth doing.
Dark's strength lies in her depiction of the inner life of key characters: the governors; and her created settler family. In Conor Mannion, she creates a POV character for herself and her audience: an outsider, wealthy and white, stricken by conscience and curiosity, but paralysed into inaction, destined to be a witness rather than a participant. Conor's helplessness mirrors our own, as Dark looks unflinchingly at the slavery intrinsic to the penal colony, and to the accumulation of wealth that is built upon its labour.
In some ways, the relative paucity of Indigenous views was less unsettling than Dark's Timeless Land recreation of a society she didn't entirely understand, but the book is much weaker for their absence, and as I wrote in my review of that book, this is a damned if you do, damned if you don't situation for her given when she wrote and the perspective she had. I deliberately read this book in close proximity to Paul Irish's Hidden in Plain View: The Aboriginal People of Coastal Sydney. So the decision to simply disregard Aboriginal viewpoints on the colony was in sharp historical context for me: both why Dark downplays them, and how unrealistic this was as a representation of life.
Perhaps worse is her creation of Johnny/Djonni, a character she portrays as straddling Aboriginal and colonist worlds. Johnny represents for Dark something of the land itself, clearly, and maybe a future beyond conflict. The problem is that Johnny's Aboriginal influences are seen only as absences of white values - a wildness, impetuosity, and aversion to routine: never as values, skills, knowledge that is sustaining. She describes Johnny as shocked to encounter French, having assumed there was only a black and a white language - when any Aboriginal group living in the Hawkesbury region at this time would have used multiple languages on a daily basis. Johnny speaks little, and uses sign language, even though he is fluent in Aboriginal languages (and actually, having deserted the colony at 8, would have almost certainly retained good English, but language development may have been less understood in the 40s, so I'll forgive that one). Johnny ends up representing some pretty awful racist stereotypes, without being explicit about Aboriginal culture.
I also managed some discomfort over Dark's approach to the power and sex relations in the colony. Both Ellen and Dilboong are expected to have sex with the men who control their lives, and Dark is rank about the power relations of sexuality. However, both women are portrayed as complying willingly - almost uncaringly - with this situation. Ellen is overtly represented as finding pleasure in this kind of sex, and Dilboong is portrayed as being willing to do anything to please. Now, I've no doubt that many women did find pleasure, power, solace in transactional sex in the colony, however, the complete absence of rape, trauma or fear in the narrative feels lop-sided, and missing a big chunk of the colonial experience.
If all this sounds too critical for four stars, well the point is that Dark's narrative gives plenty to chew over, and hence to criticise. Dark has her protagonists curiosity in how and why things work, in class and power, in race and Country, in how things may have worked out differently. Her portrayal of Bligh, in particular, is masterful, a man both Grand and petty, steely willed and narrow focused, ethical within such a narrow band as to do as much harm as good. His actions never feel forced, and through her portrayal of the individuals, Dark never ceases to give them agency, while weaving a tale of forces greater than individuals to control. Bligh is balanced by the Irish idealist Finn, who could simply have been a cut-out convict hero, but whose flaws and shortsightedness are just as frustratingly impairing as Bligh's formalism is. The pure Calvinism of her settler class: Macarther and his ilk - whose idea of righteousness is indistinguishable from wealth, status, clean and prosperous families, and hence justifies absolutely the slave labour, physical abuse, and most of all, theft of Aboriginal land that underpins their success is a triumph.
The book is flawed, and should be read alongside Anne Summers, and Paul Irish, to balance the history, but it is a fun, insightful and thought-provoking read worth doing.
February 23, 2023
An excellent continuation of the Timeless Land trilogy. Storm of Time begins in 1799 with Governor Hunter, moving on to Governor King and finishing with the tumultuous uprising against Governor Bligh in 1808. Alongside details of the early government of NSW is the rise of the scheming Macarthur and the life of the fictitious Mannion family. History, politics, power, landowners, convicts and a sympathetic attitude to aboriginals, unusual for the time this was written. Dark comes out with some stunning observations, so often not to do with Australian history, but concerning relationships between her characters. She is an impressive writer, and perhaps not as widely read these days as she deserves to be.
August 27, 2015
‘Tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered.’
The ‘Storm of Time’ is the second novel in Eleanor Dark’s trilogy ‘The Timeless Land’. It opens in 1799, in Sydney Cove, three years after Governor Arthur Phillip left the settlement. This novel covers the period from 1799 to 1808, under governors John Hunter, Philip Gidley King and William Bligh. In 1799, eleven years after European settlement, the settlements have expanded. Famine continues to be a problem as flood and drought hinder efforts towards self-sufficiency. An influx of Irish rebels convicted for political crimes adds to the complexity of the issues faced by the settlement where a battle between the New South Wales Corps and successive governors over the rum trade continues.
The Mannion family are established on the land, supported by convict labour. Ellen Prentice and her children are part of Stephen Mannion’s household at Beltrasna. The Mannion sons, Patrick and Miles are intended to reside only temporarily in New South Wales: they will in time return ‘home’. Stephen Mannion remarries, Conor Moore from Ireland and brings her to Beltrasna. And Johnny Prentice lives in the bush, preferring to be with the natives, harbouring a deep grudge against Stephen Mannion.
‘At night the land took back the silence of its centuries, and lay passive as it had done since the dawn of time under the indifferent stars.’
‘Storm of Time’ is a more complex novel than ‘The Timeless Land’. As European settlement expands, government of the colony becomes more complex. Tensions between convicts and masters, between the Aboriginals and the Europeans are depicted well. As is the ongoing battle between the New South Wales Corps and the governor.
I enjoyed the way in which Ms Dark bought her characters to life in their historic setting. While much of the focus is on the European settlers – the fictional Mannions and Johnny Prentice, and the historical figures such as William Bligh, John Macarthur and Samuel Marsden, the Aboriginal community is more peripheral. It’s impossible not to feel sorry for the (fictional) Dilboong taken into service by Stephen Mannion. I first read this novel during the 1970s and I am finding this reread rewarding. I am currently reading the final book in the trilogy ‘No Barrier’. I’d wholeheartedly recommend this trilogy to anyone interested in fiction set in Australia’s colonial past.
Jennifer Cameron-Smith
The ‘Storm of Time’ is the second novel in Eleanor Dark’s trilogy ‘The Timeless Land’. It opens in 1799, in Sydney Cove, three years after Governor Arthur Phillip left the settlement. This novel covers the period from 1799 to 1808, under governors John Hunter, Philip Gidley King and William Bligh. In 1799, eleven years after European settlement, the settlements have expanded. Famine continues to be a problem as flood and drought hinder efforts towards self-sufficiency. An influx of Irish rebels convicted for political crimes adds to the complexity of the issues faced by the settlement where a battle between the New South Wales Corps and successive governors over the rum trade continues.
The Mannion family are established on the land, supported by convict labour. Ellen Prentice and her children are part of Stephen Mannion’s household at Beltrasna. The Mannion sons, Patrick and Miles are intended to reside only temporarily in New South Wales: they will in time return ‘home’. Stephen Mannion remarries, Conor Moore from Ireland and brings her to Beltrasna. And Johnny Prentice lives in the bush, preferring to be with the natives, harbouring a deep grudge against Stephen Mannion.
‘At night the land took back the silence of its centuries, and lay passive as it had done since the dawn of time under the indifferent stars.’
‘Storm of Time’ is a more complex novel than ‘The Timeless Land’. As European settlement expands, government of the colony becomes more complex. Tensions between convicts and masters, between the Aboriginals and the Europeans are depicted well. As is the ongoing battle between the New South Wales Corps and the governor.
I enjoyed the way in which Ms Dark bought her characters to life in their historic setting. While much of the focus is on the European settlers – the fictional Mannions and Johnny Prentice, and the historical figures such as William Bligh, John Macarthur and Samuel Marsden, the Aboriginal community is more peripheral. It’s impossible not to feel sorry for the (fictional) Dilboong taken into service by Stephen Mannion. I first read this novel during the 1970s and I am finding this reread rewarding. I am currently reading the final book in the trilogy ‘No Barrier’. I’d wholeheartedly recommend this trilogy to anyone interested in fiction set in Australia’s colonial past.
Jennifer Cameron-Smith
February 9, 2017
As with The Timeless Land, absolutely magnificent.
Some of the characters too obviously exist to make a political or philosophical point, but this is a very minor criticism.
Some of the characters too obviously exist to make a political or philosophical point, but this is a very minor criticism.
February 22, 2013
The 2nd book in this trilogy - really liked it
June 15, 2013
This book got me through Australian History HSC.
Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews