Charmian Clift, her biographer Nadia Wheatley says, is the best-known Australian writer that nobody knows about. Then Wheatley pauses.
"That's good, isn't it?" she tells me on a video call, part of a conversation about the re-released collected essays of Clift she edited. "I just made that up."
Spur of the moment or not, it's probably true. Clift, who was born 99 years ago in Kiama, NSW, is a frequent subject of rediscovery. Her life suits these kinds of reappraisals. In quick brush strokes: she won a magazine beauty contest as a late teen, taking her from the sleepy coastal town where she grew up to the bright lights of the big smoke; then an affair with one of Australia's best-known Second World War correspondents in 1946 led to a long - but ultimately tragic - literary partnership.
Their affair got her sacked from the Melbourne Argus and forced a move to Sydney, where a jointly authored prize-winning novel in 1948 brought them literary attention. Clift was always caught in the shadow of her husband, even though her name was first on the dust jacket. Children and a period in London followed, before they went off the beaten track to Greece, calling the islands home for a decade. They wrote to pay the bills, living among Hydra's expatriate and artistic milieu that included a then little-known Canadian, Leonard Cohen.
Charmian Clift, often remembered for this foreign life of writing, talking and wine drinking, is forever caught in the Aegean sunshine. But she actually spent half of the 1960s decade in Australia, to where she returned when her husband, George Johnston, published My Brother Jack, the novel which forced a reckoning with the Anzac myth.
This is the period Wheatley hopes captures readers' imaginations: the years from 1964 when Clift was writing a piece each week that appeared in the Melbourne Herald and The Sydney Morning Herald. They ran on the women's pages, between the social notes and the ads for stockings from Grace Bros.
Clift called them her "sneaky little revolutions".
It's perhaps hard to imagine now the impact a newspaper column had back then. Clift's readers were keeping cuttings of her weekly column, which landed on Thursdays in Sydney. And she wrote so unlike anyone else in the newspaper.
Take this sentence, which opened a piece published on June 17, 1965: "I was writing about something different entirely when the telephone rang and I learned that my only brother was dead." What follows is an evocation of childhood, a reflection on the bond between siblings and the way people grow up and apart, shaped by circumstances that are unfair. Not many newspaper columns can make one cry, but this can.
Clift writes about family life, society, a changing Australia, immigration. She writes about white-painted bricks, coming home from the city in peak hour while wondering what the point of a five-day working week is, social drinking, the differences (and similarities) between men and women. Clift writes about abortion and Vietnam ("For surely it is a little ironic for the law to be so nice about the rights of unwanted embryo and at the same time put the lives of twenty-year-olds into a lottery barrel?"), and turns her attention with equal skill to the piles of unreturned letters and the first time in years she's home alone, unencumbered by children.
[Clift] seems to have picked up a bit of attention overseas, which often flows back to Australia in that sort of parochial way where sometimes we struggle to take interest in people until the interest comes from overseas.
- Publisher Harriet McInerney
Wheatley likens all this to a blog: the writing is immediate, engaging, personable. It's like the conversations people had between themselves.
"She liked at times to have this persona which disarmed the reader and stopped the reader from coming up with, 'Oh, you don't know anything about that politically, because you're just a woman' or 'You're not educated' or 'You're just this'," Wheatley says.
"So, there were a couple of elements in which she played herself, her intelligence down, and her knowledge down. But, yes, the persona of the essays was very close, a very close alter-ego."
One thing that grates Wheatley: the suggestion Clift was a boozer who missed deadlines. Clift took pride in being a working writer and her editors confirmed she never filed a piece late.
It's the mark of very good newspaper writing that more than five decades after the fact, it still feels current. This is a medium, after all, that is designed to be discarded.
"If a young person came to me wanting a PhD topic, I'd suggest comparing Joan Didion and Charmian Clift," Wheatley says. "Both responding to political events around them, both working in script writing forms as well as the essays, both in writing partnership with men, and so on and so forth."
This time, it was a publisher which sought to bring Clift back to the new releases table and off the dusty second-hand shelves.
Harriet McInerney, associate publisher at NewSouth, says it's the responsibility of publishing houses to keep important Australian literary works in print. Sometimes that means tracking down out-of-print volumes and the rights to reissue them.
"I've known of Clift's work for a long time, and I'd seen it sort of becoming more and more talked about ... a few newspaper articles flying around saying, 'Why haven't you read Charmian Clift?' And I realised her work was totally out of print, particularly her later work," McInerney, who steered Sneaky Little Revolutions to re-publication, says.
Falling out of print is a frequent fate for Australian writers, particularly women.
"I think there's so much interest going around in Charmian Clift's work right now. I couldn't really tell you what exactly that is. I think there are a few factors - she seems to have picked up a bit of attention overseas, which often flows back to Australia in that sort of parochial way where sometimes we struggle to take interest in people until the interest comes from overseas," McInerney says.
Clift and Johnston's lives have inspired a play and a novel; writers and devotees make pilgrimages to Hydra to drink where they drank, laugh where they laughed, write where they wrote. Johnston's semi-autobiographical My Brother Jack has long had the mark of an Australian classic; Clift's Peel Me a Lotus - an account of life on Hydra - was reissued last year. But the collections of Clift's essays had become obscure. Clift is remembered for being an Australian abroad rather than a writer at home.
Clift died by suicide in 1969 after taking an overdose of sleeping pills. She had filed her last piece four days earlier, writing about a neighbourhood squabble over a liquor licence and Sydney harbourside eating. "I'm sure if she'd been seeing it as her last statement, she'd have written a very, very different last essay," Wheatley says.
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The tragedies of lives cut short hang over the essays. Clift's husband, Johnston, died from tuberculosis a year later, aged 58. Their daughter, Shane, died by suicide in 1974 and their son, Martin - a poet, who was in a relationship with Wheatley for a time in the 1970s - died in 1990 after years of excessive drinking.
Wheatley says the myth, the tragedy, is a distraction from Clift's life. (There's a reason Wheatley's biography, published in 2001, was called The Life and Myth of Charmian Clift.) It's possible to read these pieces in the moment, as though they are fresh - because they still feel that way.
A decade in Greece has often overshadowed the years Clift spent back home at the end of her life. They were important years, bridging the Menzies era with the election that almost took Labor's Gough Whitlam to The Lodge in 1969.
"It's a really, really significant time and I would hope Australians will be interested as much in that time as stories about a foreign colony, doing whatever they do in the summer," Wheatley says.
Sneaky Little Revolutions: selected essays of Charmian Clift. Ed. Nadia Wheatley. NewSouth, 448pp. $34.99.