The Well in the Shadow is one of my most treasured works of literary criticism, and I consider it a small miracle that I came by it in such a circuitous way...

It was 2020, and we were all just learning about masks. Unprepared for any pandemic, Australia had so few of them that they were reserved for hospital staff — there weren't even enough for staff in aged care settings. Locked down throughout the city, while manufacturing cranked into gear, Melburnians went into action with cottage mask-making industries, and — in an effort to lure buyers to online book sales — the ever-enterprising Barry Scott at Transit Lounge Publishing offered a sexy black mask as a free gift for purchases over a certain amount...

So, scouring the Transit Lounge website for titles I didn't have, I came across The Well in the Shadow. The blurb sounded interesting:

Award-winning Australian author Chester Eagle journeys through Australian literature offering engaging essays on the works of writers including Miles Franklin, Patrick White, George Johnston, Beverley Farmer, Helen Garner and Alexis Wright. As Eagle says in his introduction: ‘The essays are not introductory. I consider them rather as a sharing of one writer’s reflections with the thoughts of readers who are looking for something new to add to their thinking. What the fellow-writer has to offer is the insight that comes from having also been at the heart of the risky business of creating and imagining. Writers can see what other writers are up to because they face the same problems and use the same tricks.’ These entertaining essays are linked by the essential notion of what it means to be a writer in Australia, and as such offer up valuable insights into our literature and country.

The essays discuss not just those authors who are listed in the blurb... they also include Judith Wright, Hal Porter, Frederick Manning, Henry Handel Richardson, Katharine Susannah Prichard, Sally Morgan, Barnard Eldershaw, Murray Bail and Barry Hill. Eagle's style is chatty but also informative, thoughtful, wise and occasionally provocative.



[caption id="attachment_110886" align="alignright" width="225"] Coonardoo, 1st edition (Image credit: Nathan Hobby)[/caption]

Of particular interest to me at this time — because I've just constructed a new page about Katharine Susannah Prichard (to coincide with reading Nathan Hobby's new biography The Red Witch — is Chester Eagle's essay about KSP's Coonardoo. Beginning with what he calls Interlude 2: 'As far apart as ever', he writes:

I first read Katharine Susannah Prichard's Coonardoo in 1961, and was much affected by it. I first read Sally Morgan's My Place in 2007 because I thought it might make a companion for, or provide a comparison with, its predecessor. It did. I was surprised by the way the two books spoke to each other. I read My Place slowly, trying to find its themes, then returned to Coonardoo, only to find, as often happens, that either the book or its reader had changed. In my first reading, years ago, I had felt a great sorrow for Coonardoo, had admired Prichard's handling of a harsh region of the country which I had never seen, but failed to notice many things about the story line which are obvious to me now.

Two essays then follow:

• The un-loving of Coonardoo, A white woman's version of a black woman's life, first published in 1929


• Sally Morgan's My Place, An Indian discovers she's Aboriginal; the struggle to find a way back.

'The un-loving of Coonardoo' has a two-edged meaning. It refers to the characters: the white man Hugh Watt's un-loving rejection of Coonardoo, and also to the change in literary criticism of the novel.

(I'm not going to summarise the plot or revisit my thoughts about Coonardoo and the criticism of it here because I covered that extensively in my review.)

Eagle, noting that while KSP's characterisation certainly isn't shallow, she doesn't spend much time trying to explicate the inner workings of her characters' minds. (This comment reminded me of what I had read in The Red Witch, i.e. that KSP had given short thrift to Cyril Cook's Freudian interpretation of her oeuvre.) But Eagle goes on to query whether Coonardoo is indeed the central character of the novel. He notes Mollie's rapturous response to discovering the landscape of her long-estranged father's farm, and goes on to write...

I am inclined to think that the region where Prichard's story is set is the heart of the book; that is, that the book's central character is a place, an area, a setting, a harsh and violent eco-system which even the black people find hard and white people who are unaccustomed to it find atrocious. (p.138)

To read the rest of my review please visit https://anzlitlovers.com/2022/04/27/the-well-in-the-shadow-a-writers-journey-thr... ( )