Sydney Harbour is at the centre of this imaginative process. Stead grew up in Watson’s Bay and Dark lived, for a time, in Vaucluse, the next (and wealthier) suburb. Stead, like Dark’s fictional children in Waterway, swam in the natural pools along the harbour’s edge. At night, she listened to stories of Australia and far away places told by her naturalist father, David Stead. ‘I was born into an ocean of story, or on its shores,’ she says in writing about the way stories jump time and borders, ‘the same thing could have happened anywhere; and anywhere it does.’^[7] She writes in A Waker and a Dreamer of David Stead’s genius for verbiage so that on seeing one of his books, she says:

This sense of being in a marvellous other time, of the transfer of story from place to place, of the insubstantiality of the material world, describes Stead’s own life as well as many of her narratives. Her father remarried when she was four years old and she became stepsister and carer for her siblings in an unconventional existence in which there was never enough money. David Stead’s stories of his travels and his scientific pursuits further stimulated Christina’s thriving imaginative life. It was living by the water, however, in full view of international shipping lanes, that made boarding a ship for England, when she was twenty-seven, ‘so natural, because these ships were always in and out, in and out’.^[9]

Dark, like Stead, was in the care of a father who was well known in intellectual and political circles. Dowell O’Reilly, a poet, novelist and teacher, married a distant relative when Eleanor was sixteen. Although Dark attended boarding school on Sydney’s North Shore, she spent time with Dowell at his various lodgings, where household visitors included the poet Christopher Brennan. O’Reilly, like David Stead, often relied on a daughter to bring order to his home. Both girls became office workers for a time in the city area but when they reached their twenties their life patterns diverged dramatically. Stead decided that although she loved Sydney and that she was ‘full of Australian culture’, she wanted to go abroad.^[10] Eleanor married Eric Dark in 1922 and she was living in Katoomba and settled as a doctor’s wife when Stead left Australia in 1928. Dark was content to remain in the Blue Mountains, where she could have a settled home and walk and climb in the Australian bush. Her letters written during a tour of the United States in 1937 reveal her admiration of American open spaces, especially Yosemite National Park, but her reaction to New York is typical of her suspicion of the cosmopolitan crush:

Dark’s evident distaste for the compression of modernity resonates with the sense of physical freedom she so often associates with life in Australia. This ambivalence about modern life would find its way into her interrogation of ‘modern’ Australia in Waterway, when she celebrated the benefits of a modern attractive city in a peaceful landscape but critiqued the corrosive effects of parochialism and unchecked nationalism. If New York was to be the future, it would not be her future, and, after publication of Waterway, she spent more than a decade focusing on a historical trilogy of Australia, in which she would interrogate the ‘idea of Australia’, as she told her publisher.^[12] Whereas Stead’s interests were taken up with European politics and international writers in the 1940s, Dark promoted writing in Australia about Australia, if not a national literature. She told Jean Devanny in 1945:

Dark would always find it difficult to negotiate this realisation. Sydney in the 1930s, however, provided a brilliant location for an investigation of a national rhetoric of modernity and progress. In the white and monocultural space of Waterway, characters make their way around the harbour’s edges to the city centre, as they ruminate on the difficulties of their lives. Their decision-making processes inevitably involve some form of interaction with harbour water or ocean, which becomes a device for the meeting of the old world and the new.

Ian Harnet, for example, revels in watching ships from afar reach Sydney and he looks at them ‘with the eye of the landsman as things haloed with glamour and romance!’.^[14] This pleasure in adventure is, however, restrained and he is content to maintain the gap between land and sea, between place and space. The ships bring the imaginary of the wider world across the Pacific to Sydney but neither Harnet, nor any of the characters in the novel, feel the urge to leave Australia. In fact, Winifred Sellman, the only traveller in the novel, tells Harnet how glad she is to be back in Australia, almost echoing Dark’s refrain during her American tour.