Chapter 18 - Haunted Vitality

Summary

‘Vitalities’ describes the creative-destructive energies of the globalised harbour city with its geographically sprawling, culturally diverse suburban mosaic. Yet as ground zero of British invasion in 1788, Sydney is also ‘haunted’. Dispossessive colonisation ghosts not only its colonial archive but can be glimpsed in the city’s landforms and topography. ‘Haunted vitalities’ recur in settler, sojourner and migrant writings that thematize Sydney Harbour’s vertical sublime and the city’s horizontal suburban sprawl. Working from the interwar period to the present, this chapter reads settler texts about Sydney alongside texts by First Nations people. Beyond interwar, harbour-centric works– Christina Stead’s Seven Poor Men of Sydney (1934), Kenneth Slessor’s elegiac poem ‘Five Bells’ (1939) and Eleanor Dark’s novel Waterway (1938)– the spatial frame is widened to Greater Metropolitan Sydney, moving from Eleanor Dark’s reimagining of British invasion in The Timeless Land (1941), to Ruby Langford Ginibi’s memoir Don’t Take Your Love to Town (1988) and Julie Janson’s novel Benevolence (2020). With Gail Jones’s Five Bells (2011), the chapter returns to the harbour to consider how this contemporary novel not only reckons with Sydney’s settler-colonial past through a world literary frame but also attends to the presence and voice of First Nations people.