Forty years on, Elizabeth Jolley’s The Well still unsettles with its haunted landscape, psychological dread and buried desire. Graeme Karstaedt reflects on this Australian classic.
Spotlight/Literature
Unearthing the Terror in Elizabeth Jolley’s The Well
25 June 2026
- Reading time • 8 minutesLiterature
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Cover Image: Elizabeth Jolley is one of Australia’s leading writers. Image sourced from State Library of Western Australia.
The prominent Western Australian author Elizabeth Jolley was born in England in 1923 and migrated to Perth at the age of 36. She died in 2007. Her unique fiction brings a sense of the author’s own internationalism to customary Australian themes, thereby injecting new interest into the form. Jolley had a special talent for cultivating a sense of terror and dread in the Australian countryside. In her precise and nightmarish prose, the reader detects William Golding’s vision of human evil, or the occult powers that circulate through the stories of Kafka.
Jolley’s novel, The Well, was published 40 years ago and duly won the prestigious Miles Franklin Award. Although it was not her first novel, The Well’s numinous and malignant air makes it an example par excellence of her work. The primary characters are the no-longer-young, unmarried and disabled Hester Harper and her prepossessing teenage ward, Katherine. There is an unmistakably sapphic tone to their relationship; the novel’s image of hidden underground water is a superb metaphor for latent sexual desire, whether lesbian or otherwise. The setting is Hester’s inherited country farm, which in due course she sells off. Jolley’s idiosyncratic syntax, particularly when rendering the characters’ speech, and grim humour contribute to the dark fabric she weaves. The knot in the narrative is Katherine’s collision, while driving back from a party at night, with a man on the track; in desperation, Hester and Katherine dispose of the body in a nearby well. But their victim refuses to stay put. Standard Freudian interpretations fail to do justice to the rich and terrifying echoes emanating from Jolley’s well, rising forth and bursting through every hardened layer of Australia’s geography, history and psychology.
Here is a sample of The Well’s poignant lyricism: “Never, she thought while the hairbrush steadily pressed the long sweeps of her strong hair downwards, had her paddocks looked so beautiful. From where they sat they looked across fold after fold of silent silvered stubble. In the moonlight the land seemed to be lifted up, raised as if held in offering towards the moon and the stars. Every stalk seemed clear and separate as if made of precious metal.”
And the creepiness of the Australian country: “The rocks marked the way into the hidden yard. Unless a turn was made at the rocks a visitor would be likely to go on and miss the cottage altogether. The track itself disappeared into an old firebreak now overgrown with scrub and merging with a dried-out creek bed, an old water course which never ran with water. Hester thought there were salt lakes further on. Eerie places she said to Katherine once. They never went to investigate.” Or this: “Already long fingers of a pale honey-coloured light were creeping across the place where the endless black paddocks merged with the endless black sky.”
The Well is assisted by Jolley’s sly use of form. Following the party that triggers the macabre collision and its consequences, the novel’s chaptering dissolves — in mimicry of Hester’s collapsing mental state — and only resumes much later, when some semblance of order has been restored. And the repeated knot in the narrative, first in medias res at the novel’s outset in the present tense, and then in chronological sequence in the past tense, is a marvellous piece of psychological dislocation: Jolley makes alterations in wording, sometimes very subtle (“‘Katherine we’re nearly at the bend’” and “‘Kathy! we’re nearly at the bend,’” respectively), in the two descriptions of the same event.
While comparisons might justifiably be made to the earlier novels, I find the most instructive progenitor to be Jolley’s story “Grasshoppers”, published in Westerly magazine in 1979. “Grasshoppers” is about an unnamed old woman living on her isolated country farm, who receives a visit from her daughter and granddaughter. Unexpectedly, they each bring with them a friend their own age, themselves a mother and daughter. The two mothers appear to have some kind of romantic relationship. They leave their children with the old woman and go on a week-long trip to India. The old woman’s home soon becomes hellish, and the story proceeds to its terrible dénouement in the darkness. By the end, a fundamental change — both psychic and physical — has happened. The titular grasshoppers that sing in the night offer an eerie, quasi-aural motif that lingers even after the story’s end; the grasshoppers refer to the children playing on the farm, and might just as easily apply to the two mothers, who “grasshop” all the way from Australia to India and back. The ending is cryptic; at first it may seem disappointing, but upon reflection it is quite fitting, indeed inevitable.
If I may be permitted a personal digression, Jolley has remained for me, since I first encountered her work in high school, a persistent but inscrutable presence. The Well was an assigned novel in Year 11, and, like several other formative influences (Lord of the Flies or Othello), it gave me the sense that fiction, when shaped by skilful hands, can somehow plumb the very deepest levels of human experience. My English teacher told her class of millennials that Jolley had visited our school the year before and — this sticks in my mind — responded to the inevitable question, “But what does it mean?” by turning the question back on the student and asking, “What do you think it means?” Indeed, this is the wisest and most helpful answer that an author can give.
When I enrolled at Curtin University, where Jolley taught creative writing for many years, I often walked into and past the lecture theatre named in her honour. My doctoral supervisor at Murdoch University had met Jolley and retailed to me some of her amusing palaver. And, strangely enough, a prospective landlord — trying to assess my suitability as a tenant — inquired about my background and vocation and, having discovered that I was a scribbler of sorts, enthusiastically informed me that she herself worked in the publishing business and had known Jolley personally. Needless to say, the landlord’s report on Jolley was exclusively positive. Although the rental did not materialise, the incident added to Jolley’s aura.
Elizabeth Jolley was based in Western Australia since 1959. Image supplied.
It is a minor regret that I shall now never have the chance to meet Jolley. But, as an author of the first rank, her work seems destined to build and build upon itself as time goes on, always revealing new and startling implications; just like the mysterious glimmers and reflections from the sweeping Australian fastness.
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