If Charmian Clift were alive, she would be celebrating her 100th birthday on Wednesday, August 30. It would be a fabulous party, that’s for sure. Whether in Sydney, in London, or on the Greek islands of Kalymnos and Hydra, the shindigs thrown by Charmian Clift and her husband, George Johnston, were legendary.

In her absence, celebrations will take the form of public events, including the presentation of a series of “picture windows” into the author’s life and work at the State Library of New South Wales on the night. A picnic and walk in the author’s heartland of Kiama on the NSW south coast is scheduled for mid-October.

Clift’s other heartland, of course, was Greece. It was there, in 1955, that she found her voice as a writer. Although she had previously published two novels in collaboration with her husband, it was when she transformed her journal jottings (begun as research notes for Johnston) into her first solo book that she developed the lyrical yet conversational prose style that is her trademark. This memoir-cum-travel-book, Mermaid Singing (published in 1956), was followed by a second, Peel Me a Lotus (1958), and two novels.

For all four books, reviews were good but sales were poor. With no access to her readership, the author was isolated and invisible on her island. Yet, the main problem was that she was in advance of her time. Readers

in the 1950s did not want the kind of account of a woman’s personal life that Clift gave in her “travel” books, and the female protagonists of her novels broke the rules of what was seen as “women’s fiction”.

It was not until she returned to Australia in 1964 that her professional career really took off, with the publication of her weekly column in the women’s pages of The Sydney Morning Herald and The Melbourne Herald. Swags of fan mail from readers of both sexes, together with the fact that a Sydney department store
bought the advertising space next to her column on a regular basis, meant that she was free to make what she dubbed her “sneaky little revolutions” despite the conservative editorial policies of these newspapers.

But the demands of the weekly deadline, together with the pressures of looking after three teenage children and a mortally ill husband, left no time for the book that Clift described as “the novel that every writer wants to do”. Titled The End of the Morning, this was (in the author’s words) “about a girl called Cressida Morley, who has appeared already in My Brother Jack but I invented her first, and her eccentric family who live in a weatherboard cottage on the edge of a beach”. This was left unfinished when she took her own life in July 1969, at the age of 46.

Five decades later, Clift’s time has come.