FLUVIAL ORIFICES AND PROTEAN SANDS
Abstract
Introduction Born at Cloona House, Dunmurry, on the outskirts of Belfast in 1870, Beatrice Grimshaw was one of the best-known writers working in popular fictional genres during the first half of the twentieth century. Grimshaw was also a prolific journalist, a tourist promoter, and a passionate traveller who toured extensively in the Pacific both before and during her residency (1907-1934) in what is present-day Papua New Guinea. Focusing on her travel writing, this paper is concerned with Grimshaw 's representation of two landscapes: the beach and the estuary. As is shown below, Grimshaw 's response to these terrains is radically divergent. This is despite the fact that they share numerous topographical characteristics. Both are threshold positions, points of arrival and departure; both are borderlands which erode any definite notion of a border; both are between states where coast and ocean, river and brine mingle; imbued with a mobility that eschews any sense of fixity and stasis; both are amorphous spaces which refuse to be reduced to the tyranny of either/or. Existing 'betwixt and between' ( Turner 1969, 95), in a state of constant flux which renders clear lines of demarcation impossible, the beach and the estuary are ambiguous