Do Australian Modernisms Strike Back? Still Harping on ‘Margins’

New modernist studies problematize the term ‘modernism’, its uses and abuses, therefore views on non-hierarchical modernist constellations exemplify the “simultaneous uncontemporaneities” Patrick Williams expanded upon in 2000. The purported ‘belatedness’ of ‘other’ modernisms is predicated on such premises, with Oceania, and more specifically Australia, as a fertile case in question. By looking askance at peripheral modernisms, and thus trying to read against the grain of a stale and debatable centre/margin cultural divide, this paper investigates many received assumptions by focussing on two women writers who have both been marginally included under the ‘modernist umbrella’: Christina Stead, an Australian expatriate to both Britain and the US, and Eleanor Dark, who chose to remain unabashedly local. In particular, I investigate Waterway (1938) and Seven Poor Men of Sydney (1934), novels in which Dark and Stead portray the metropolitan fluidities of the capital city of a settler-state described by John Williams as a ‘quarantined culture’.