Pristine Nature

None of Dorothy’s novels and but a few of her stories take place in an urban setting. Her setting almost exclusive is nature, and not the idealized nature of 19th romanticists, but a raw, pristine nature that is neither friend or foe, good or evil, but a force that at once envelops and transcends humanity. In a sense, it can be said that nature itself is her main character. Which may be one reason why modern-day readers, urban dwellers nearly all, have trouble relating to Dorothy’s work. (For full references, see “Reference Key”)

“Much the same beautiful indifference of light falls on the land when it is sleekly silvern and flower-patterened with plenty, and upon a world shrunken with drought and the dry-rot of death.” (Gold, p. 286)

”The grey fluffy seed-heads, and grey rustling skeletons of each heat-slain flower and weed, as they bleached together among the dead herbage. But none gave me the thrill of the blossoming almond tree. It was not as other flowers; it was a shining miracle of perfectness. I lay beneath with meditative brown hands clasped against my little tummy, and in my own way I worshiped it, in its pink crinkled glory.” (Gold, p. 42)

”I rested my arms of a rusty bar of the old gate, a bar that had been above my head when I first stood there. In the Garden of Tomorrow the roses were still in blossom, and the feathery tops of the young cypresses swayed in the sunshine; beyond was the tree basin of the town; beyond that the heaving cultivated hills. And, far beyond them, across the open farmlands of the Darling Downs, and beyond the fleshy desolation of the pear country, far, far to the west, lay the mulga. [grassland]” (Gold, p. 107)

“It was very dark beneath the trees, and they dripped in a delightfully morbid manner, in fact they were ‘in tune’ with my mood, and all poets know how helpful that is.” (Gold, p. 93)

Joan’s grandmother’s death. Against the doctor’s orders, the ailing old woman sets out on a walk alone. “She was dead some hours later; tiny and frail, sitting watching the sunset paint the splendid hills.” (Gold, 117)

”I passed the oleander bushes still faintly showing their colours in the moonlight, on among flowering orange trees: dark greenery all corralled with white stars, scenting the hot, dry-blue night air, for, though the oleander smelled strongest under the sun, the night belonged to the orange flowers.” (Gold, p. 131)

”He had known men who toiled slowly under the blasting sun, with steady intensity of labour carving out the wherewithal of life from the sun sun-bitten grey of the world: slow toiling men on new fence lines, creeping across arid virgin lands; infinite sweating on the red face of new roads; patient working and following of slow stock, by men who gained at last something of their animal’s deliberation of thought and movement; slow suffering of hell-doomed working bullocks dragging plough and scoop through the powder-white clay of new tank sites; dragging with brute patience of pain on days when the iron draw-chains burnt as if drawn from fire, and the white mirage flickered across the burr-brown flats.” (Gold, p. 145)

”A live marred by much of human cruelty and meanness, vice, and slander born of monotony; and yet an impressively epic contest between patience and strength of man and the immense, indifferent cruelty of nature in her less domestic moods.” (Gold, p. 145)

”There was a glow of apricot coals in the grate, and on the cream mantel massed pink roses, and it might have been that the reflection of these touched my grandmother’s cheeks. She was dead some hours later; tiny and frail, sitting watching the sunset paint the splendid hills.” (Gold, p. 99, p.117)

”The lonely pageant of life was behind them, with its fruit blossom of youth, its storms, its agonies, its splendor or noon, and they were left for just a little while to chirrup in the sunset.” (Gold, p. 82)

” I have tried to picture a drama on which I have so often hear you comment--to set against the immensity and indifferent of nature the poignant and yet strangely passing lives of men . The one so vast, emotionless, cruel, lovely, and eternal; the others so quickly ended, whose suffering seems so needless and leaves so little trace, and yet which are in a way so much more than the march of days and nights that obliterates them.” (Battle, ‘Introduction,’ p. 5)

”Boastfulness, lasciviousness, cruelty slipped from him as he watched the low storm. He became part of life: savage and primitive--yet splendid with old conflict. Planning life's oldest battle: the contest with the earth. Noblest of battles surely, in that it must be waged so long as men would live: that it gave life not death.” (Battle, p. 17)

”The bleached plain closed in upon him. A world of faded grass and burr, where crickets sang. The heat of the earth was almost too great to bear, and yet, pulling his hat down so that it shaded his neck, he sprawled relaxed. Heat above—below: calling of crickets and dry whispering short grass all about. His cheeks burned to the living glow of the hot ground, withered sweet grass leaves touched his lips.” (Battle, p. 205)

”The hunter alertly moving and killing, and the eagles dropping out of the infinite heavens to devour the kills with which he had finished, seemed the only things awake and alert in the sunny bowl of the world. And all day as he hunted there stayed with him the foolish memory of little sounds in the darkness indicative of the infinite continuance of the joke.” (Battle, p.205)

“The Everglades were not a blue and running sea, but they too were a sea—of water and grass: limitless, sprawling, shining with light; each foot in their thousands of square miles rotting cleanly; growing passionately as they had from the morning of time.” (Reefs. p. 139)

”Anguish made him foolish. His hand exerted unconscious pressure upon the forward rim of his sand basin and a strong rivulet of white sand flowed down up the beach as the forward lip of the basin began to lower before his eyes.” (Reefs, p.166)

”What had taken it? Was it not a man but a thing that the birds had circled? Whatever it was, he was marooned with it under waking stars and falling night. Turning slowly, he looked about him. But there was only the pallor of the dunes and the leaden silver of the blowing salt grass and the great sound of the sea.” (Reefs, p.171)

“Repeatedly he rose to the full of his twenty-inch height and scolded the grey-and-black bowl of the earth and the cold whiteness of the now high-risen moon. The, feeling a little reassured, and because it is the nature of babies to sleep, he slept, holding tightly to the fur of his dead mother.” (Orphan, p.17)

“A storm that should not have developed had swung into the northern reaches of the great grass flats. The body of the fire was still miles away, but it was already a great fire and growing, so that while, as yet, no actual flame topped the horizon, no pulsating rose, no orange, told of furious burning.” (‘The Gantlet of Flames’)

”Suffering, he swam with all his strength with the current that still would not let him rise. His lungs cried for breath, and the normal world of sky and air seemed an unattainable heaven.” (‘The Mysterious Box.’)

”About him now the fantastic light lay in bars of flame between the great trunks, so that the dead leaves seemed coals of fire, and on the green leaves the light was blots of blood. (‘Hurricane Wedding’)

”As he emerged from the forest the wind caught him like a great pain. For old his strength and old Timothy's weight, he could not maintain contact with the earth, and reeled like a reed in the torrent of air.” (Ibid)

”The sweat of his rhythmically laboring chest glittered, as did the dark foliage drenched by the last wild flowers, while the harsh sound of his breathing held something of the still-restrained violence of the gusts that tossed the jungle roof to a roar of leaves and abruptly ceased.” (Ibid)

”The top spins even faster. Its whirling edges tear into the surface of the seal, tuning the sea to foam and the foam to mist and the mist to a great cry that is a scream that is thunder, and a thunder that passes the capacity of hearing, The sea rises before it, unable to fall back against the wind, and ever piling upon itself.” (‘Hurricane, North Atlantic’)

”Men worked until there was pain in their hearts like a little fire that ran to and fro, and the trembling shook their bodies, and the legs were uncertain of their step. Men worked through the day, through the night, into the next day, into a blur of day and night, until their hands were raw, until it seemed they had no further strength to work; and yet they kept working.” (Ibid)