Two Walks is an experimental exercise in literary psychogeography that responds to the legacies of two modernist Australian authors, Eleanor Dark and Christina Stead, both of whom inhabited the imaginative space of Sydney’s eastern suburbs for a short but formative period in their lives. Taking cues from the Surrealist novels of the 1920s and 1930s, it brings Dark and Stead together through a process of mental mapping generated by two walks along the harbour foreshore.

The first tracks the strip of coastline stretching from the northern part of Rose Bay to Nielsen Park, Vaucluse, known as the Hermitage Foreshore Walk, and which provides the setting for Dark’s 1938 novel, Waterway, while the second traverses the cliff edge terrain of the Watsons Bay South Head Heritage Trail - a landscape that exerts an unmistakable influence on Stead’s fiction.

Rumination upon these two unlikely muses prompts non-linear journeys through literary space and time, giving way to a cathartic working through the cultural issues brought to the fore by the global trauma of the COVID-19 pandemic.

82pp A5 Booklet
ISBN: 978-0-646-85197-6
Printed in Sydney, 2021
AUD $18 (including local postage within Australia)