Eleanor Dark AO (1901-1985), writer, was born and educated in Sydney but moved to the Blue Mountains to live after her marriage in 1922. Dark began her career as an author writing stories for journals including the Home and the Bulletin. It took her nine years to secure a publisher for her first novel, Slow Dawning, which was released in 1932. Over the next twenty years she produced nine more novels, culminating in The Timeless Land, Storm of Time and No Barrier (1941-1953), an important historical trilogy tracing the development of white settlement in Australia between 1788 and 1814. The Timeless Land became the Book of the Month selection on its US publication and has been described as a key text not only for students of the first period in Australian history but of ethnic conflict in general. Dark was awarded the Gold Medal of the Australian Literature Society in 1934 and 1936. Varuna, her family home in Katoomba, has been restored and functions as a writers' centre associated with the Eleanor Dark Foundation.
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