Lantana Lane

Whilst Eleanor Dark lived most of her life in Katoomba at Varuna, in 1951 she and husband Eric went to Queensland, escaping the repercussions of both being named in federal parliament as communist supporters in 1947. They bought a farm and began to grow macadamias and citrus fruit, and she wrote Lantana Lane. It is a book about living in a rural community a little separate from the rest of the world. It gently satirises the 1950s materialist, bigger, better, faster, smarter social...
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Whilst Eleanor Dark lived most of her life in Katoomba at Varuna, in 1951 she and husband Eric went to Queensland, escaping the repercussions of both being named in federal parliament as communist supporters in 1947. They bought a farm and began to grow macadamias and citrus fruit, and she wrote Lantana Lane. It is a book about living in a rural community a little separate from the rest of the world. It gently satirises the 1950s materialist, bigger, better, faster, smarter social conventions. The image of lantana in the book, a noxious, exotic plant covering the detritus of society, was used to good visual effect in the 2000 Australian movie Lantana (director: Ray Lawrence).Eleanor O'Reilly was born in Sydney in 1901. In 1922, she married Eric Dark, a general practitioner and the couple moved to Katoomba and lived there for the remainder of their lives, with occasional journeys away. Eleanor pursued her writing as time permitted, completing nine novels by the 1950s, including the classic work The Timeless Land. Varuna Writers Centre in Katoomba was formerly the Darks' home. Eleanor Dark died in 1985.