Environment and Colonial Shadows: Green Island 1932

Abstract

"There is a good deal to be said" wrote Nettie Palmer "for letting the mind rest in one spot, small enough to hold the affections and, perhaps, be understood"(Palmer, 1988 484). For nearly a year, from April in 1932, the Palmers lived on Green Island, that "little grain of rice, that hyphen-stroke, that island Captain Cook already named Green"(Palmer n.d. 2), a coral cay in North Queensland. Ecological change happens swiftly and is registered plainly in bounded spaces such as islands. For Nettie, her nine month sojourn became a search to understand the meaning of the island, this small world, as well as the surrounding reef, and its relationship to the ocean. And, this conscious search for meaning was connected to the wider task seeking words and ways to write about it: "I had had time to watch, there, and to ask a few questions, waking up to them day after day: and I think that was what the island meant to me in the end"(Palmer n.d. 2). While Vance Palmer left few direct autobiographical accounts of Green Island, for him, too, his stay was a time of re-assessment and renewal, a hyphen stroke, an experience that was to shape his mature works. They were both in their late forties.