People Australia

Eleanor Dark, by Max Dupain, c.1940

State Library of New South Wales, 110580850

Eleanor Dark, née O'Reilly (1901-1985) author, and political and community activist 

Birth: 26 August 1901 at Croydon, Sydney, daughter of native-born parents Dowell Philip O'Reilly (1865-1923), poet and Labor activist, and his first wife Eleanor Grace, née McCullouch (1870-1914). Marriage: 1 February 1922 at St Matthias’s Anglican Church, Paddington, Sydney, to Eric Payten Dark, a medical practitioner and a widower with one son. They had one son Brian Michael. Death: 11 September 1985 at Katoomba Hospital, NSW. 

• Eleanor was educated at Redlands, Sydney, where during the 1917 strike her first political thoughts were fleetingly encouraged by labour activism at the Neutral Bay tram shed. She attended secretarial college, then worked as stenographer in a legal firm.
• After her marriage she resided in Katoomba, where the Depression was a radicalising influence, and became engaged in left-wing politics as a writer and intellectual.
• She supported socialism but did not believe this would lead to utopia, and was suspicious of adulation for the Soviet Union and against joining political parties, believing that institutions destroy ideas they set out to propagate. ‘Not so much a radical as a heretic’ (Humphrey McQueen).
• Strongly interested in conservation and anti-development.
• Shareholder in People’s Printing and Publishing Co. as a protest against WW II censorship.
• Provided practical support for striking miners in 1949 by purchasing a truck to take food and supplies to the Lithgow strikers.
• Joined NSW Peace Council and spoke at 1950 conference. Prominent in opposition to 1951 legislation to ban the Communist Party of Australia. The Darks were supporters of the Council for Civil Liberties.
• She suffered ostracism and vilification from reputation she and husband Eric acquired as 'communists' and the ‘Blue Mountains Reds’.
• For almost twenty years, she was “the best selling serious novelist in Australia”, writing fiction expressing socialist and feminist concerns. Her most significant work, The Timeless Land (historical novel), presents history from the point of view of Aboriginal people.
• Cause of death: left ventricular failure (2 months) and arterisclerotic disease.
• Eleanor Dark was perhaps ‘the most sensitive of the novelists of the 1930s’. (Macintyre). 

Sources
Heather Radi (ed) 200 Australian Women a Redress anthology (Sydney, 1988), pp. 209-210; Stuart Macintyre, The Reds: The Communist Party of Australia from origins to illegality (Sydney, 1998); Barbara Brooks with Judith Clark, Eleanor Dark; a writer’s life, (Sydney1998).