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In her entry on Eleanor Dark in the Australian Dictionary of Biography, Marivic Wyndham notes that “psychology fascinated Dark, and the bush was her physical and spiritual solace.” As Wyndham continues, “[Dark] drew compelling landscapes of the mind and of the Australian natural environment.”1 This article will discuss the dissolution of boundaries between the landscape and mindscape in Dark’s work, and it will consider how the natural world infiltrates modernist explorations of interiority in Dark’s third published novel, Return to Coolami (1936).2 In examining the convergence of modernism and ecopoetics in Dark’s prose, this essay brings together two supposedly distinct modes of critical enquiry: environmental humanities scholarship and modernism studies. By exploring the intersection of these two approaches, this reading will challenge the binary conception in which modernist texts lack any authorial, subjective, or narratorial investment in the natural world and, in so doing, bring to light a range of complementarities between ecopoetics and modernism. In Return to Coolami, the natural world inescapably affects human interiority, and Dark’s eco-modern prose precipitates a new awareness of ecological being that complicates anthropocentric worldviews.' (Introduction)
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Philament
