Dampening incendiary ardour: the roots of Marjorie Barnard's "dry spell". (Literature).

ALTHOUGH MARJORIE BARNARD may not yet be recognised as one of the most significant Australian writers of the 1930s, her short stories have always been admired, and one of them is remarkable for both stunning Frank Dalby Davison and baffling later readers. He had been rather a stem critic of her short fiction, but when she gave him "Dry Spell" to read in July 1940 she reported getting "quite a jolt": its effect on him was like a torpedo which "holed [him] below the water line". It is a powerful and intriguing story, the appeal of which lies not only in its allusive obscurity, but also in a more successful integration of narrative interest, political ideas, personal anguish and symbolic resources than Barnard achieved in most other work inspired by the war. In this essay I will put forward a number of possible interpretations of "Dry Spell" and some suggestions as to why it might have had such an impact on Davison.

"Dry Spell" is set in the third waterless summer of a prolonged drought. Around Sydney "was a great fan of desolation. The sun had beaten the Emu Plains to a black brown on which the isolated houses ... drifted like flotsam on a dead sea." In the bush the gum trees were dying, and agriculture had come to a standstill: "Orchards were long since dead, and the trees fallen on the eroded ground ... The flats that used to be vegetable gardens were bare." The long-term desiccation of the continent feared in My Australia has been fantastically accelerated: even the fertile eastern seaboard has gone the way of the add inland. Near the narrator's home the hills of the golf course

 
   were stripped to pale brown and tawny purple. The earth was like starved, 
   sagging flesh of an iron skeleton ... I used to think that the desert of 
   Arizona looked like that. Now I know that heat and drought can bring even 
   the gentlest country to it. 

The story crackles with images of fire, impending destruction and a sense of retribution. Bushfires have licked through the scrub on the outskirts of the city, leaving patches of black: "wide firebreaks had been cut as the only protection ... They looked like the trail of vengeance." The fine houses in the wealthy suburbs are exposed when

 
   the gardens that had embowered them were perished. Tinder dry, fire had 
   been through many of them, scorching walls and blistering the paint ... The 
   owners had fled, not so much from present hardship, as from the nebulous 
   threat of being trapped in a doomed city. 

Suggestions of looming catastrophe are everywhere: "The whole of our civilization was piled up like a pyre waiting for the fire to consume it." The social effects of the drought are rather like those of a war or depression: water and food are rationed, there is unemployment as a result of scarcity; and there is always a crowd of idlers at the post office reading weather bulletins, but nobody believes them:

 
   The city seethed with rumours and with the promulgation of fantastic 
   schemes, but everyone is fatalistic about the drought. They didn't expect 
   it to break, they even took an inverted pride in it. It, at least, relieved 
   them of the responsibility of living their own lives.