Eleanor Dark was born in Sydney, the second of three children of the poet, writer and parliamentarian Dowell O'Reilly and his wife, Eleanor McCulloch O'Reilly. She studied at the Redlands College for Girls at Cremorne, and was known as Pixie O'Reilly. On finishing school and unable to enter university, having failed mathematics, she learnt typing and took a secretarial job. In February 1922 she married Dr Eric Payten Dark (1889–1987), a widower and general practitioner who wrote books, articles and pamphlets on politics and medicine. She became step-mother to his two-year-old son. Eric Dark was an active member of the Labor left in New South Wales, was involved in contemporary political debate and was a committed socialist and one-time Communist. His books include The World Against Russia and Who are the Reds. They lived in Katoomba, New South Wales, where Eleanor bore their son Michael.
It was here that she wrote eight of her ten novels, as well as short stories and articles.[2] She was a frequent contributor to Walkabout magazine, where she shared, wrote Eric Lowe, her love of Australian flora[3] This love is evident in her 1955 article on 'The Blackall Range Country'[4] and in her sense of life and light in a 1951 article about the beauty of Central Australia:
This is luminous country. The naked hills […] are incandescent, and such other colours as exist to afford contrast – the bonewhite trunks of the graceful ghost-gums, the pale yellow tufts of spinifex, and the blue of the sky – seem only to emphasise their furnace glow.[5]
She also wrote under the pseudonym "Patricia O'Rane".[6]
She and her husband were, in September 1949, charter members of the Australian Peace Council.[7]
In the 1950s they bought a farm in Montville, Queensland, where they spent part of the year for seven years. Eleanor wrote her last published work, Lantana Lane at the farm. Their son Michael had also moved to Queensland, where he eventually married and had two daughters. Dr Dark's political writing and involvement in left-wing circles attracted attention from anti-communist elements within the Menzies Government and the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation (ASIO). Like many writers and social commentators of the time who were critical of Menzies or were left-wing, it is certain that the Darks were under surveillance. This surveillance extended to Eric Dark's first son from his first marriage, John Dark, and possibly to his second son with Eleanor, Michael Dark.
Eleanor Dark's best known work is The Timeless Land (1941), the first part of a trilogy, with Storm of Time (1948) and No Barrier (1953).
She was appointed an Officer of the Order of Australia in the Australia Day Honours of 1977.[8] In her later years she suffered writer's block, osteoarthritis and depression, and lived upstairs as a virtual recluse, rarely seeing friends or relatives. She died in 1985, aged 84.
Michael Dark inherited the family home 'Varuna' in Katoomba, which in 1988 was turned into a writers' centre known as Varuna, The Writers' House. It is managed by the Eleanor Dark Foundation, of which Michael Dark remained President until his death in July 2015.[9]
