AustLit

'This is a piece of creative non-fiction merging art commentary, literary analysis, and a personal account of the writer’s research. Changes across time in the writer’s understanding of an Australian painting – Breakfast Piece (1936) by Herbert Badham – are examined, with the writer’s slowness to comprehend the painting’s overt allusion to the Italian invasion of Ethiopia (Abyssinia) highlighted. The writer’s discovery that Breakfast Piece was reproduced on the covers of a 1985 edition of Eleanor Dark’s 1945 novel The Little Company and a 1991 edition of Elizabeth Harrower’s 1966 novel The Watch Tower provokes an analysis of these authors’ treatment of international geopolitical affairs and local gender relations.'  (Publication abstract)

'In Eleanor Dark’s novel Waterway (1938), Professor Channon is prompted by the ominous international headline ‘Failure of Peace Talks’ to imagine the world from a global perspective (120). Channon feels himself metaphorically ‘lifted away from the earth … seeing it from an incredible distance, and with an incredible, an all-embracing comprehension’ (119-20). This move outward from a located perspective to ‘a more detached overview of a wider global space’ signifies a cosmopolitan viewpoint, ‘in which the viewing subject rises above the placebound attachments of the nation-state to take the measure of the world as a wider totality’ (Hegglund 8-9). Yet even this global view is mediated by Channon’s position from within ‘a great island continent alone in its south sea’ (121). Gazing from a ‘vast distance,’ he views Europe as ‘the patches where parasitic man had lived longest and most densely,’ and from which humankind ‘went out to infect fresh lands’ (120). This description of old world Europe as ‘parasitic’ provides a glimpse of resistant nationalism, reflecting Channon’s location within one of the ‘fresh lands’ affected by colonisation. Channon is ultimately unable to sustain a ‘Godlike’ perspective in this scene, desiring ‘nothing but to return’ to local place (121). Although his view initially ‘vaults beyond the bounds of national affiliation’ (Alexander and Moran 4), this move outward does not ‘nullify an affective attachment to the more grounded locations of human attachment’ (Hegglund 20). Channon’s return to the ‘shabby home … of his own humanity’ brings a renewed sense of connection to ‘the sun-warmed rail of the gate’ and ‘the faint breeze [which] ruffled the hair back from his forehead’ (122).' (Introduction)