Eleanor Dark’s Enduring Achievement

At eighty years old but still on the shelves of my local library,  Eleanor Dark’s The Timeless Land remains one of the best books written about Australian Aborigines and white Australian history as well.

As the title conveys, she captures the timelessness of Aboriginal life, little changed over thousands of years until 1788, with its usually leisurely communal life. There is the overwhelming  sense of magic controlling all of life, the natural bush  little changed in eternity, the unimaginably remote  past melded into a dreamtime of supernatural ancestors creating the  society and its customs; celebrated religiously with ceremonies of dance and song, their culture blended into the land. The people lived off the land in small clan groups of perhaps fifty people, who rarely moved far from their clan land, or towrie.  Most action was taken as a clan group. Life was usually short – forty was old.  Frequent bursts of impulsive anger among individuals and lethal battles with…