Given that both writers were published overseas by internationally based firms, the reviews of these works offered an appropriate closing comment on the relationship between the national and the global before World War II. New York reviews of House of All Nations, published a few months before Waterway in 1938, commented on the bizarre brilliance of the book and the heightened fantasy elements. Hazel Rowley said that Stead was undoubtedly influenced by the mid 1930s European emphasis on documentary form, but many felt the book was too long and too crowded (there were more than 100 characters in the novel).^[44] Sales were not what Stead had expected, although this was due partly to poor marketing. Stead was doubly disappointed as she had wanted to use the income from this most transnational of novels to fund a visit to Sydney. In Sydney, however, reviews were mixed and tended to focus on Stead’s style rather than on content.

American critics praised Waterway and Australian reviews were generally positive, although the 24-hour time frame and plot devices were a sticking point. Although it was hard to buy the novel in Sydney, it was available in London, where Dark’s friends Mary Alice and Bert Evatt saw it on a bookstall at Victoria Station.^[45] Dark had similar marketing problems to Stead: publishers complained of disappointing sales, but the books were difficult to obtain in Australia or were subjected to small print runs. Like Waterway, House of All Nations was not reprinted for many years.

After these works were published, the gap between the authors’ writing widened, although they were each subject to the traumas of Cold War politics. Stead continued to live in Europe and America after World War II, writing continually and consolidating an international literary reputation that would see her described, finally, as a major writer in English in the twentieth century. Dark changed literary mode and wrote a historical trilogy, the first volume of which, The Timeless Land, was sent to Australian troops. Barbara Brooks wrote that a copy of Waterway was held in Changi Prison and, for the Australians, ‘[n]o-one else brought Sydney home to us as she did’.^[46] Dark moved between Katoomba and Montville in Queensland and her longest period of travel was a trip around Australia in 1948.

The women’s writing continued to circulate around the world but in Australia they became part of quite different literary traditions. Dark is grouped, usually, with her inter-war network of Australian women authors and precedence is given to her representations of national ideas and a particular geographical sense of place, while Stead’s literary stature is configured around the transnational. The points of contact in the imaginative journey that began around Sydney Harbour, however, show how complex and interdependent is the relationship between the national and the global. Stead died in Sydney in 1983 and Dark in Katoomba in 1985. Their respective funerals were attended by a small group of family and close friends but their stories continued to interest successive waves of readers, at home and abroad, in different ways of looking out at the world.