Ghosts of the past: Mapping the colonial in Eleanor Darks fiction

This paper examines Eleanor Dark's fiction from the 1930s and 1940s, for what it tells us about literature, history and place. By attending to where action takes place in her novels we find a particular engagement with Sydney and its origins, as they are represented in the landscape, in urban form, in language and in maps. Dark¿s constructs a literary map of Sydney in which the past sits beside the present, refusing to be silent, and this juxtaposition of past and present provides one of the most powerful tools for social and cultural critique in her work.