The Life and Myth of Charmian Clift

PROLOGUE

Where does it start? Where does it end? Is there any true line of demarcation between what is veritable and what is not?¹

We cannot overcome the tendency to shape ourselves in the image other people have of us. People we meet cast us in a role, and we play it whether we will or not. It is not so much the example of others we imitate as the reflection of ourselves in their eyes.²

This is the story of three women — a real woman, called Charmian Clift, a fictional woman, best known as Cressida Morley, and a third woman, who has become more famous than either of these. This third figure is the mythical Charmian — partly the product of the inventions of Clift herself and her husband George Johnston, but even more the creation of a collaboration between the Australian media and the Australian public. While the biographies of these three women are of considerable interest in themselves, this book is also concerned with mapping the invisible boundaries that lie between the territories known as ‘real life’, ‘fiction’ and ‘myth’.

To some extent, we all fabricate at least something of our biographical stories. Even Sigmund Freud is supposed to have said: ‘We don’t remember our childhood. We remember our memories of our childhood’. And yet while most people live their lives twice — once when the events occur, and another time in the selective and partly imagined memory of those events — the difference with Charmian Clift is a matter of purpose and of degree. Like many authors, Clift set out to write her account of her early life for publication as an autobiographical novel. But she didn’t do this once, and get it over with. She did it again and again, through three decades of abandoned typescripts.

It seems that even in childhood, Charmian was already imagining a kind of parallel version of her life, featuring a young girl who was similar to her, but far happier and more successful. When she began writing seriously, in her late teens or early twenties, her subject was herself and her home town landscape. By the beginning of her professional career, in the late 1940s or early 1950s, Charmian Clift was naming her alter ego ‘Christine Morley’ in various drafts of an autobiographical novel entitled Greener Grows the Grass. In 1962 Charmian Clift renamed this character ‘Cressida Morley’ when she started the novel again, with the title The End of the Morning.³

While neither of these texts was completed and none of Clift’s writing about the Morley family was ever published, the author’s husband George Johnston, working sometimes alone and sometimes in collaboration with his wife, also used aspects of the character and experience of Charmian Clift to develop a fictional female character who went under a couple of different names and who adopted slightly different guises. In particular, as Clift in the Greek winter of 1962–63 put aside her work on The End of the Morning so that she could assist her sick husband with his autobiographical novel, her fictional alter ego slipped from one text to the other. Thus the reading public first became acquainted with Cressida Morley when George Johnston’s novel My Brother Jack was published in 1964. While Cressida makes only a cameo appearance in that work, the character of the green-eyed gunner with sand between her toes is so vivid that she immediately took an unforgettable place in contemporary Australian fiction. This place would be confirmed when Cressida reappeared in the second book of Johnston’s trilogy in the guise of a beautiful but unfaithful wife.

While the development — the biography — of Cressida Morley is problematic, the difficulties compound when Charmian Clift in ‘real life’ seems to follow patterns foreshadowed in the fictions, growing into Cressida Morley or her other alter egos in the same way that the early autobiographical characters grew out of Charmian Clift.

As the process of writing and rewriting — of creating role after role and alter ego after alter ego — went on, the story of the past went through a series of changes. It would be simple to say that, as these texts were purporting to be fiction, then all versions are ‘true’. However, as fictional details started to feel like memories, these ‘memories’ were also incorporated into the overtly non-fictional record of Clift’s newspaper column, and they further appeared in interviews which the author gave. In this way, the writer’s fiction began to turn into myth.

As time went on, Clift increasingly blurred the boundaries between public and private, between fiction and non-fiction, and between her work and her life. The ultimate manifestation of this is the alter ego persona that Charmian Clift adopted, under her own name, for the weekly newspaper column which she published between 1964 and 1969. Sometimes the writer dropped into this column whole slabs of the ‘fiction’ narrated by Cressida Morley.

While this biography sets out to explore the way in which a writer (or, in this case, two writers) draw upon life in order to create fiction, the story of Charmian Clift also reveals the way in which fiction can start to influence and even direct life — causing new ‘real’ events which in turn influence or direct the next development in the ‘fiction’. When experience immediately becomes grist to the writer’s mill, it is sometimes only a small step to the creation or provocation of events in order to improve the plot or move the story along. Thus to a great degree Charmian Clift could be seen as an autobiographical writer who self-consciously lived out her text, with herself as both hero and narrator. This life/novel crosses between the genres of autobiography, fiction and non-fiction in a distinctly postmodern fashion.

It can be dangerous, of course, to cross boundaries. While George Johnston’s self-assurance grew as he charted the development of his alter ego David Meredith, Charmian Clift privately became less and less secure as she increasingly found herself publicly revealed, either in her own creations or in those of her husband. Perhaps the problem lies in the fact that the Cressida Morley story was a collaborative novel. As the model for the character increasingly lost her ‘real’ identity, it became more and more difficult for her to keep control of the plot.

Overall, Charmian Clift’s published literary output was relatively small, consisting as it does of three novels written in partnership with her husband, two travel books, two solo novels, and 225 essays. Of her two decade career as a published writer, she spent only eight of these twenty-one years in her homeland. Yet her effect on Australian society was far greater than these statistics suggest. In every generation there are certain writers who function as national weather vanes, recording change in the social and political climate. Charmian Clift was one of these. Yet as well as recording political change in the volatile years of the 1960s, she was also instrumental in helping Australian society discard many of the narrow and xenophobic values which it had held through the Cold War period.

Outside the covers of their various texts, the lives of Charmian Clift and George Johnston encapsulated certain archetypal elements of the twentieth century Australian experience. George Johnston’s autobiographical novel My Brother Jack was both a popular and a literary success because it told the story that a generation of Australians had lived, through the period between the wars. Clift’s story — published in snippets through her column — picked up the tale of a Depression childhood and presented a liberated woman’s view of life on the suburban home front. While Charmian Clift and George Johnston did not consciously set out to shape Australian identity and history, they are nevertheless significant transformational figures. Again and again we find them expressing ideas that would not become current for years or even decades. More significantly, we find them not just thinking but acting on and living out these ideas. For example, finding life in post-war Australia politically and socially claustrophobic, they voted against Menzies by living in exile. Returning to their homeland after thirteen years, they immediately engaged with challenges such as Australia’s role in Asia and the increasingly multicultural nature of Australian society. If these were some of the political themes of the Great Australian Novel which these two writers collaboratively presented to their compatriots, the tale could be subtitled ‘The Story of a Modern Marriage’.

To a great degree Charmian Clift and George Johnston played out in their own relationship in the 1950s and 1960s the conflict of the realignment of gender roles which would be the subject of feminist theory and debate in the 1970s. Not only did they tackle issues of freedom and control within relationships at a time when most post-war marriages were placidly following the pre-war model, but they confronted these issues in a particularly head-on way. Just as Charmian Clift was passionately committed to a belief in her inalienable right to personal freedom, George Johnston — born half a generation earlier — was at heart a traditional husband. Yet because of his generally liberal views, he would question his own position and try to understand what he could not endorse. Naturally, in the manner of revolutionary vanguardists, these two discovered that omelettes cannot be made without the breaking of eggs.

It is because Clift and Johnston were forerunners and extremists that the story of their lives and their relationship has become important to many Australian people — even to those who have barely read a word they wrote. They were archetypes; ourselves writ large; experimenters who could test and try things for us; legendary figures through whom we could live vicariously. So important were they as cultural figures that their story is still current, three decades after their deaths. Through their lives they may have written the Great Australian Novel, but since their deaths they have developed into mythical figures.

Of course, while myth has no real beginning or end, it also does not bother itself with cause and effect. Nor does it worry about contradictions. Parallel tellings are vital to the fabric. Truth is an irrelevance. In life, however, and in biography, there are no such luxuries. If there is trouble when the boundary between fact and fiction is breached, it is also the case that every action holds within itself every past action, while simultaneously contributing to the shape of the future.

So how did it happen that Charmian Clift defied society’s limitations? Why did she aspire, like Icarus, to reach the sun? And how did there develop around her a myth so strong that she herself would become lost in it — a myth so necessary to the Australian public that they would continue to seek it and feed it long after her death?

Even to begin to answer these questions it is necessary to place Charmian Clift — not at a Sydney party of the 1960s, among a crowd of actors and anti-Vietnam activists; not in Greece of the 1950s, at a waterfront table where international jet-setters mingle with artists of every nationality; and not in the heady scene of wartime Melbourne, where any number of brass hats are keen to buy a drink for a beautiful young lieutenant. The key to Charmian Clift can be found in a small, dull country town in the period between the wars.

PART I

SMALL TOWN GIRL

1

THE CENTRE OF THE WORLD

The centre of the world was the last house of five identical wooden cottages at the bottom of the hill, just before the new concrete bridge that spanned the creek [ … ] It was obviously the end, rather than the beginning of somewhere.¹

Kiama is a dot on the New South Wales coastline, twenty-five kilometres from the industrial city of Wollongong and a hundred kilometres south of Sydney.

Ringed by the hazy blue bulk of the Illawarra escarpment, a series of steep hills spill down to a narrow coastal strip, where jutting promontories of purplish black rock are intersected by ragged inlets, or sweeps of silver sand. During the long time of Aboriginal history, these inlets provided fishing grounds rich in blackfish, flathead and bream, while from the rock platforms around the headlands there could be gathered an abundance of shellfish, crabs and small octopus, or sometimes even the crayfish that lurked on the shelves beneath the water.

One of these rock platforms was special. Here a shift in the earth’s crust had created a large cone-shaped hole that opened into an underwater cavern. As the surf frothed and boiled inside this funnel, there was a constant hiss and thundering, as if a mighty creature were trapped below; it spouted like a whale when the seas pounded hard from the southeast. For the local people, this blowhole provided a landmark, a meeting spot, probably a sacred place: translations of the Aboriginal name ‘Kiaramaa’ include the meanings ‘where the sea makes a noise’ and ‘a mysterious spirit’ as well as the equally apt description of ‘plenty of food; good fishing ground’.²

This food included the small animals as well as the fruits and vegetables to be found in the subtropical rainforest which covered the ridges and valleys that ran back to the escarpment. With the area’s high rainfall there was also plenty of fresh water, and rivers and creeks spilled down the gorges before collecting into wide-mouthed lagoons that ran sluggishly out to sea. In the forest itself, ferns and vines sheltered under a canopy that included the trees which would later acquire the European name of cedar.

It was for the cedar trees that the white men came in the 1820s, logging the forest giants and shipping them out from the small bay that was protected by the promontory where the blowhole provided a convenient marker to boats coming in. As a tribute to the abundance of cedar, some of the early loggers dubbed this little harbour ‘Lebanon Bay’; long after the last evidence of the forest was gone, this name would be incorporated into the mythology of the place, and Charmian Clift would use it as the fictional name for the township in her novel Walk to the Paradise Gardens.³ In the area just behind the bay a site for a town was reserved as early as 1826, although the first allotments were not sold until 1840. When laying out the grid of streets on paper, the Sydney surveyors made no allowance for the terrain: many of the streets shoot straight up and over the hills, skewing the perspectives and testing the fitness of pedestrians.

Once the loggers had cleared the trees, it was easy for squatters to move in with their herds of livestock. By the 1830s, tracts of the coastal hinterland were being granted for the grazing of beef cattle, and the original inhabitants were forced off their hunting grounds, back to the thin coastal strip. Treated as pariahs in the small developing township, a number of Koori families made a base for themselves on a massive promontory situated a couple of kilometres to the north of ‘Kiaramaa’. The people had their own name for this headland area, too; when the white men heard it, they would write it down as ‘Bombo’. There was good fishing here, in the deep chasms of the rock platform, and good shelter around a small enclosed bay on the northern side.

Meanwhile, in the rolling grasslands, the graziers could hardly believe how lush the pastures were. It seemed a waste to use this land for beef cattle, and so by the middle of the nineteenth century the farmers changed over to dairy. While this change resulted in small family farms rather than large landholdings, it would also affect the social climate of the area.

As dairy cows have to be milked morning and night, dairying families lead lives of restricted movement and rigid timetables. This causes a kind of fettered mindset, which in turn produces a particular type of rural conservatism. As the market centre for the cluster of little settlements around the area, Kiama developed as a typical dairying town, where the solid citizens and their wives seemed at times as slow and complacent as the local livestock.

Yet the location of Kiama at least allowed a sea breeze to blow upon the inhabitants of the respectable white-painted residences that clambered prettily up the amphitheatre of hills rising back from the sea. The location was also a drawcard for visiting holiday-makers; by the 1860s and 1870s tourists were already catching the steamer down from Sydney in order to see the extraordinary blowhole on the point, or to paddle at the edge of the safe beaches to the south of the town. (Swimming in the surf would not be legal in Kiama until 1908.⁴)

While the volcanic soil provided excellent pastures, the land was also rich in basalt. In the 1870s the newcomers started opening up quarries in the heart of Kiama and in the nearby hills and headlands. Now the town began to echo with the boom of gelignite and the hoot of the steam whistle blowing for smoko or knock-off — or sometimes, unexpectedly and terribly, to announce an accident. By 1883 the volume of blasting and crushing was so great that 400 tons of stone a day were being shipped out of Kiama harbour by sail and by steam, in order to provide blue metal for the roads and tram tracks and railway lines of the developing colony.⁵

Around this time the commissioners in charge of the New South Wales Railways established their own quarry on the headland known as Bombo, and built their own jetty in the little bay on the northern side, which was dubbed ‘the Boneyard’.

It was time-consuming, however, to load the gravel into ships, and so in 1893 the railway line was brought down from Sydney to service both the Commissioners’ Quarry and the quarries around the township. After cutting deep through Bombo hill, the trains ran along the dunes, crossed a trestle over a reedy creek, threaded their way through another tunnel beneath Pheasant Point, and finally crossed the town to the siding where the gravel was loaded. Twenty years later, the quiet of Kiama was shattered even more irrevocably when a set of tracks was laid along the two main thoroughfares, and steam trams began to rattle back and forth, taking gravel to the railway siding or to the huge hoppers built on the edge of the harbour basin.

Of course, the growth of the quarry industry brought a radical change to the social composition of the town. Now, alongside the population of shopkeepers and service providers, dairy farmers and wheat growers, there was a large workforce of stone crushers and spawlers as well as a smaller number of skilled quarry workers. Morning and night the hilly streets resounded with the tramp-tramp of hobnailed boots as men in loose-crotched working trousers and flannel undershirts and peaked caps marched back and forth with their crib-tins. Single men with dirty faces jammed the hotels and boarding houses, to the dismay of those landladies hoping for a nice clientele of family holiday-makers, and the respectable menfolk of the town became concerned lest their daughters and sisters should meet — or even marry! — such rabble. As a result of community pressure, the quarry proprietors started to build terraces of small weatherboard cottages which could be rented to long-term employees; the aim was to attract a stable core of married workers.

Out at Bombo, the little Koori settlement had been swelled by a shanty town of itinerant stone crushers who lived around the edges of the quarry in shacks built of scavenged tin and hessian bags. It was a kilometre or so back along the highway towards town that the railway commissioners built their string of worker cottages on the flat land that adjoined the reedy creek, alongside the Kiama cemetery. Though tactfully given the name of North Kiama, this small huddle of poky dwellings that squatted in salty gardens beside the dusty road was regarded by the townsfolk as the backblocks — the sticks — the farthest outpost of civilisation. It was here, where the creek formed a stagnant pool beneath the road bridge, that a sign announced the end of the Kiama municipality.

And it was in the very last house out of town, the one next to the creek, overlooking the graveyard, that Charmian Clift was born on 30 August 1923.

The centre of the world was the last house of five identical wooden cottages at the bottom of the hill, just before the new concrete bridge that spanned the creek.

It was the last house of the town in fact, because on the other side of the bridge you were in a different municipality, and there was no other settlement until you came to the small village of Bombo, a mile or so away over the hills — unless you counted the white settlement of the dead in which my mother gratefully took refuge from Boles’s cows, and at which she looked with loathing from the security of her kitchen window.

The creek looped around the five cottages, separated from their front picket fences by the width of the highway, then trickled through the tall striding silvery legs of the railway bridge and spread out on the beach beyond in a wide brackish bowl which we children dignified with the name of lagoon; all of us had to learn to swim in it first, before our father permitted us the lovely dangerous pleasures of the surf.

The house was permeated by the smell of this creek, a richly rotten smell of hot mud and decaying seaweed [ … ] and invaded by drifts of fine yellow sand. Only the retaining wall of the railway embankment kept the beach in its place, you felt. But for that the sand would long ago have reclaimed highway, creek and houses too. You could never forget how close the sea was. Once, after a heavy storm, there had been seaweed draped on the front fence in the morning.

My mother had done what she could with the front of the house, screening the verandah with a jungle of plants: there were asparagus ferns, fat hydrangea bushes with huge heads the colour of litmus paper, climbing geraniums of red and pink and white, sweet peas in season, and a marvellous fuchsia bush hung with brilliant satiny bells. But nothing could disguise the shabbiness of the cottage, nor really distinguish it materially from its neighbours. It remained a square wooden box, bisected laterally by a narrow hall, and vertically by thin weatherboard walls which divided it into four compartments of equal size. There was a small room tacked on behind to serve for a kitchen, a tin shed for washing, and up at the end of the yard a high narrow dunny which discreetly faced the paling fence and was partly hidden by sunflowers or staked dahlias according to the season.

Apart from this terrace of quarry cottages there was not more than a score or so of houses at this end of the town, all variations on the same architectural butterbox theme, their faded corrugated iron roofs straggling down beside the plunging swoop of the gunmetal highway.

It was obviously the end, rather than the beginning of somewhere.

Lebanon Bay proper lay over the hump of Pheasant Point and through the Cutting. It was a pretty place of solid brick bungalows and older, more graceful houses of stone and wood with wide verandahs held by slim cedar posts, set down in pleasant gardens on vertiginous hills and laced together about two wide shopping streets and a small hoop of harbour with the dark stiff serried vertical of Norfolk pines.⁶

This picture of her birthplace which Charmian Clift gives in the unfinished autobiographical novel The End of the Morning shows her photographic sense of recall.⁷ In regard to the real landscape, its small and perfect self-containment cannot be overemphasised. Here, in a valley that could be seen in a glance, was everything in the young child’s world: the quarry where the father worked, the home where the mother worked, enclosed on all sides by sea and hills. There was also a shop, a railway station, a graveyard, and a road running straight through the middle. If a child were building a landscape in a sandpit, this is the sort of microcosm that she would make. But for this particular child, the microcosm was all the world.

When Charmian was born, her brother was aged only fourteen months, and her sister was not yet at school. Their mother cannot often have braved the walk to town: it would have been near impossible for her to push two babies in a pram up the terrible hill over Pheasant Point, or to take the other way, through the Cutting. As the young Charmian began to crawl, to walk, she would only have gone as far as the yard and the beach. And as she looked towards the horizons of the sea and the hilltops, it must have seemed as if that was all there was. So that when Clift described her house as ‘the centre of the world’, she was speaking quite literally. To a child toddling towards the gate of that cottage, looking up and around, the feeling was of being at the earth’s hub. And in the mornings, as the heat haze rose, the valley seemed to lie under a spell …

Morning then was a long time, or even, if you came to think about it, a round time — symmetrical anyway, and contained under a thin, radiant, dome-shaped cover that was perhaps the celestial pattern for all the dome-shaped covers which in those days still preserved such sentimental mementos as bridal wreaths, cake decorations from weddings and christenings, funeral ribbons, army biscuits carved with camels, sphinxes modelled from matchsticks, golden keys presented at twenty-firsts, babies’ shoes, and small bullet-dented Bibles that had been worn over soldiers’ hearts.⁸

Simplified representation of North Kiama, Bombo and Kiama, as they were from the 1920s to 1940s.

In this description, which is part of the opening passage of The End of the Morning, Clift uses the conceit of the glass dome to run through a list which includes the main aspects of human life on earth — from birth to death, from peace to war, through the rituals of baptism and wedding and funeral, and with reference to pagan as well as Christian ritual. The mementos themselves are the sort which could be found inside the glass domes which normal families — such as George Johnston’s semi-fictionalised Meredith family — gave ‘place of honour on top of the pianola’.⁹ Charmian’s family, however, (for here the novel can be read as non-fiction) was above such mundane and mortal things.

We Morleys, having neither wreath, ribbon, nor army biscuit (my mother [ … ] had been married sensibly in a coat and skirt; my father [ … ] had curtly refused to go and fight for bloody England; not one of us three children had been christened; and the thought of death in connection with any of us was absurd), laughed contemptuously at the dusty relics that other people preserved. We were an arrogant lot and all inclined by temperament to prefer celestial domes anyway.

In this ‘celestial dome’, we see the world that the child Charmian saw as she lifted her eyes to the horizons of her bowl-shaped valley:

The morning dome was a beautiful one, pure, and of a size adequate to encompass the far blue bulk of Jamberoo and the Saddleback; a hundred or so round hills [ … ] and even the sea itself — so vast, so silky dark, so brilliantly glittering, advancing unhurriedly in measured ranks of terrible power that curled out slow white banners as they neared the beach.

The sound of the sea filled the mornings. It was like living inside a shell. The soothing monotonous surf music beat and beat back from the hills, crump and swoosh, crump and swoosh, over and over and over.¹⁰

Yet if Charmian’s childhood world was complete, it was not a completeness which reduced itself to a single tone. While the landscape acquainted the child with the frenzy of the elements,¹¹ this same landscape also made her feel secure. This feeling is captured when Julia, in Walk to the Paradise Gardens, returns to Lebanon Bay.

Wherever she had walked in her childhood Julia had been conscious of those miles of ocean advancing; and conscious, too, of the security of great blue basalt columns beneath her feet, supporting paddocks and houses and towns and farms.

And now again there returned to her the old childish feeling of security and certainty, the old unthinking chant that had always risen in her in the presence of majesty: the earth is strong: the sea is big.¹²

This sense of the earth as ‘majesty’ expresses the pantheism that was the unconscious religion of Charmian’s childhood: she worshipped her own place, and all that was in it.

It is indicative of Charmian Clift’s obsession with her birthplace that she would frequently return to it in her fiction. On at least four separate occasions she wrote ‘arrival scenes’ — scenes in which the reader is invited, through the eyes of different protagonists, to see the place for the first time. These arrivals always go beyond mere descriptions of setting, for they represent epiphanies; not for nothing is the earliest of these accounts entitled ‘The Awakening’.

In the novel Walk to the Paradise Gardens, the writer’s alter ego appears in the guise of the urban sophisticate Julia, who is somewhat reluctantly visiting her home town of Lebanon Bay in the company of her wealthy architect husband Charles, who has never been to the area before. The author brings the couple into town from the south and positions them on the crown of Pheasant Point, where ‘suddenly, magically’ they ‘discover Lebanon Bay’. Through the eyes of Charles and Julia, we are able to get both an outside and an inside viewpoint. On his first sight of the valley and beach, Charles exclaims not just at the view, but at his wife’s secret possession of it:

‘What right did you have to withhold all this from your lawful husband? For that matter, how could you? You must have had it there in your head, all the time, all these years. How could you carry it about with you for so long? All those funny round hills bumping about under your hats … that enormous quantity of sea battering endlessly behind your eyes!’

Indeed, Julia has so internalised the landscape that the sight of it is almost painful:

It had been in her head, all of it, for all these years. Even the sea itself, so vast, so silky dark, so brilliantly glittering, brushed with moving acres of silver where the swell breathed against the sun, and with a ship as big as a matchstick held motionless on the far curved line of the horizon [ … ]

She felt that her eyes were bulging with the enormous pressure of the sea behind them. As if, literally, the neat, small, durable casing of her skull had expanded to contain all that was Lebanon Bay, perfectly preserved under its thin, radiant, dome-shaped cover of sky.¹³

With this extraordinary image of her own skull expanding to encase the dome of sky which in turn is the transparent lid which preserves her childhood universe, Clift allows us to enter her body for a moment and experience the beating of the sea inside her brain. At the same time, we sense the fragility of the thin shell of bone and flesh that has to hold all this.

As Julia turns to her husband to ‘offer to him what she had unwittingly but so perfectly preserved’, she finds that the moment to share her secret possession is over: Charles is reversing the Jaguar, going back into the town of Lebanon Bay that lies on the other side of the hill. It is the town that makes Julia reluctant to return; the town and its people.

While landscape is the first key to Charmian Clift, it is not just the geography of the small valley at North Kiama, but also the social landscape of the town that clung to its carefully graded structures as tightly as it clung to the rugged coastline on which it was perched. Kiama in the period between the wars was a place where the open wildness of nature was in stark contrast to the restrictions of the social scene.

As well as residents of the township, the social network of Kiama stretched to include the farming families of the district and the inhabitants of the outlying hamlets. Local newspapers of the time give a picture of the residents as hardworking country folk, not much interested in national — let alone international — events, and somewhat suspicious and resentful about goings-on in distant places such as Sydney and ‘the southern state’. It was the rural part of the local economy which was privileged in the Kiama media: the majority of news items during the 1920s and 1930s revolved around matters such as milk and butter prices, stock sales and agricultural shows, the eradication of rabbits, the value of silage, or the meetings of organisations such as the Kiama Pastures Protection Board, the Southern Branch of the Illawarra Milking Shorthorn Association or the Agricultural Societies of Kiama itself and nearby towns such as Dapto, Albion Park and Berry. Despite the fact that the town relied heavily on its industrial base, there were only occasional articles referring to quarrying, or even to the developing coastal tourist industry.

Like most local rags, however, the Kiama Independent (which came out on Saturdays) and the Kiama Reporter (the Wednesday paper)¹⁴ mainly existed in order to advertise and report on the social functions of the various clubs and societies. These included daytime activities such as flower shows and fetes, picnic sports days and sales of work, while at night there were concerts and dances, euchre parties and balls; in any week there would be a dozen events going on. These were usually ‘benefits’ — fundraising ‘dos’ organised by the various churches or by secular organisations such as the Oddfellows or the Loyal Star of the South Lodge, the Kiama Ambulance and Hospital, the football clubs or surf clubs, the Rover Scouts, the Parents and Citizens, the Women’s Guild, the Red Cross, the Rifle Club, or the Kiama Municipal Band.¹⁵ There was also a range of sporting competitions — for men, at least — including golf and bowls and tennis as well as rifle shooting, football, cricket and surfing. The ladies could watch.

As for culture, that was safely governed by the School of Arts Association. In most of the south coast hamlets, as well as in Kiama itself, there was a School of Arts hall, where occasional lectures were held as well as balls and meetings; and there was always a shelf or two of dusty volumes tucked out of the way of the tea urn. The town of Kiama even boasted its own library, stocked with British classics and popular romances. Meanwhile, the Kiama cinema provided an increasingly popular form of narrative escape, and opened a window onto the world of glamour and romance.

Glancing through the yellowing copies of these old local newspapers, it is easy to get the impression that the residents of Kiama and the surrounding district were a ‘clubbable’ folk, revelling in every possible variety of harmless fun. On any given day or night there seems to have been a range of social activities in which any citizen could have chosen to participate. This was not in fact the case. Reading between the lines, there is evident a rigid social code which would have signalled itself to the Kiama cognoscenti. No left-footer, for instance, would have attended the Annual Dance of the Loyal Star of the South Lodge, just as the members of the audience for the Grand Concert with minstrels in aid of the Jamberoo Methodist Church would not have considered attending the Convent Euchre Party and Dance at Shellharbour.

As well as differing religious loyalties, there were other divisions just as clear. Although the Australian rhetoric of democracy would not openly acknowledge the existence of a class system, everybody knew which prominent local families were in ‘the silvertail set’,¹⁶ and which were not. It was, of course, the older rural families who comprised this Kiama upper crust, together with certain families in which the breadwinner owned an established business or worked in a professional or managerial capacity. Beneath this there was the ‘respectable’ working class — the skilled workers and tradesmen, some of whom even owned their own houses. And at the bottom of the social pyramid there were the unskilled quarry workers and their families, whose position was openly signalled by the fact that they lived in the strings of identical tiny weatherboard cottages which were owned by the quarry companies.

In Charmian Clift’s very early unfinished novel Greener Grows the Grass, there is a sort of rehearsal for Julia and Charles’s discovery of Lebanon Bay. Here the author’s alter ego, Christine Morley, is still young and unsophisticated; she has escaped from her home town but has not completed her climb up the class scale. The text opens as this young woman brings her older and decidedly cosmopolitan lover Justin to the town where she grew up, and where her parents still reside. Like Charles, Justin stops the car on a bluff overlooking the landscape; like Charles, he feels left out, and oddly embarrassed to be there: ‘It was her moment, not his. He couldn’t share it with her’. Christine herself is so overwhelmed that she weeps. ‘I didn’t think it would be as important as this, coming home’, she tells her lover. And later she warns him: ‘It gets you, you know, this place. Wait a while darling, and it’ll get you too. Wherever you are it will get you and drag you back’.

Although Christine at this moment is happy to be returning, her mood shifts on the next page as the couple drive through the town and she starts to remember her past there. Some of these memories reflect the class distinctions of the place where the writer grew up. Christine, giving directions to her parents’ house, tells Justin to go: ‘Up the hill and over. Then we’re on the wrong side of the hill. I suppose it still is the wrong side of the hill. It always has been’. She concludes with a promise to herself: ‘I’ll show the bastards on the right side’.

As Justin follows the directions, we get the full sense of the social as well as the physical landscape — as seen through the unsentimental eyes of Christine Morley’s upper-class lover:

The houses had thinned out now, and they were not the solid, comfortable houses of the town. Weatherboard instead of brick. No trees. Not many gardens. Shabby. A haze quivering on red tin roofs. The brakes yelped when he pulled up the car.

He felt embarrassed again. He felt somehow flat, too. The house wasn’t what he had expected, though he didn’t know quite what he had expected. Putty-coloured weatherboard, red tin roof. Some roses growing in the yard or two of ground behind the white picket fence. A small house. A narrow, uninteresting house. Not right for her. He couldn’t fit her into it.¹⁷

As we shall see, the author, like her alter ego, did not ‘fit in’, either to the little hamlet of North Kiama/Bombo, or to the township of Kiama proper, over the hill. Because of certain peculiarities of her family’s background and aspirations, Charmian would occupy an ambiguous position in regard to the local class structure. This would result in her feeling excluded from the social framework. The memories of this social isolation would drag her back — wherever she was. At the same time, a great deal of her life would be spent in an attempt to ‘show the bastards on the right side’ of the hill.

Freedom/restriction. Wildness/security. Beauty/ugliness. Pull/push …

Throughout her life, Charmian Clift had a relationship with her home town which combined love and loathing in about equal degrees. Although as a child she thought it was paradise, as a young woman she found it a trap from which she couldn’t get out quickly enough. The dreams of escape which Charmian harboured during her adolescence were to become a dangerous habit, causing her to feel throughout most of her adult life that the grass would be greener just a little bit over the hill. All she had to do to get out of the trap was cut and run, make a fresh start … Yet if Charmian Clift’s escape route took her further and further afield, she was only ever comfortable in landscapes that reminded her of her birthplace; and she could never live happily away from the sea. To the painter Cedric Flower, who knew Charmian from her early twenties to the end of her life, she was always ‘just the girl from Kiama’.¹⁸ And that part of the fictional Cressida Morley which was depicted as the girl with sand between her toes was — with a little poetic licence — drawn from life.

Yet while the geography of Kiama became almost part of Charmian Clift’s body, the social scenery imprinted itself firmly onto her soul. The sensible and sympathetic general practitioner who was Charmian’s family doctor in Sydney in the 1960s commented, ‘Of course, she was always just a small town girl at heart’.¹⁹ This doctor saw through the sophisticate in his surgery to the woman who lacked self-assurance to an extraordinary degree; he caught a glimpse of the girl who had grown up on the wrong side of town, in a position of social isolation and ambiguity, and who always felt that she had to act somehow bigger, better, brighter, bolder in order to make up for it.

2

LIARS AND EMBROIDERERS

All my family were tremendous liars and inventors and embroiderers [ … ] It didn’t seem like lying exactly, but just rearranging and augmenting a little to get a richer or more dramatic or more unusual effect. Maybe a lot of it was actually true.¹

Charmian Clift would spend her whole writing career going back again and again not just to her birthplace but to the story of what had happened before she was born. Like the narrator of her favourite book, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Charmian was fascinated by the question of how the accident of her birth had happened. Probably rightly, she seemed to feel that her mother’s story held some vital clue.

Amy Lila Currie was born in the New South Wales township of Inverell on 16 December 1886, the first child of James Archibald Currie, a twenty-three year old coachbuilder, and Sarah Currie née Carson, aged twenty. In describing her mother’s background, Clift notes that Amy was descended from ‘a Scottish father with a dash of French in his blood, and a mother who was a beautiful Irish Jewess’.² In regard to Amy’s fictional counterpart, Grace Morley née Carson, Clift refers to Grace’s ‘mixed ancestry (Scotch, Irish and French as well as Jewish)’, then goes on to stress the Jewish component as Grace’s ‘dominant race strain’.³ Later in The End of the Morning, Clift identifies herself through Cressida with this maternal side, declaring that she and her beloved brother ‘reflected [their] mother’s mixed ancestry (Scotch and Irish as well as Jewish)’.⁴

It is typical of Charmian Clift that she would be inordinately proud of her Jewish ancestry, for she liked to identify herself with a race of outsiders and wanderers who had suffered centuries of exile and oppression. And so again and again, in fictional and non-fictional accounts, she describes her maternal grandmother, Sarah Carson, the ‘Irish Jewess’. However, Charmian never realised that her little blonde paternal grandmother was also Jewish.

Overall, Sarah was the most important figure in the family legend, in spite — or perhaps because — of the fact that she was the only grandparent whom the Clift children never met. And if Charmian Clift chose to identify with Sarah in her fiction — bestowing her first name upon one of her earliest alter egos and giving her surname to Cressida Morley’s mother — this too was appropriate, for the young Charmian had a great deal in common with this vivacious grandmother.

Sarah Jane Carson was born in January 1866 in Muswellbrook, New South Wales. Her father, Samuel Carson, was a thirty-two year old storekeeper who had been born in Ireland. Her twenty-one year old mother, Caroline Day, was from a hamlet near the township of Singleton.⁵ The couple had married three years previously, and already had a son. By the time Sarah was a young woman, the family had moved to Inverell, where again the parents had a general store. From all accounts, Samuel and Caroline were mean and unkindly. Sarah was the opposite. On more than one occasion Clift refers to

A story my mother used to tell of my grandmother, Sara [sic] Carson, who, according to family legend, was a tragically beautiful Irish-Jewess with a hand so small that she could put it inside a lamp chimney to clean it, and who won waltzing competitions in a rose taffeta dress with a glass of water balanced on her lovely head and eggshells on the heels of her dancing slippers.⁶

Appropriately, in a family of embroiderers and yarn spinners, she made lace to sell.⁷

While Sarah formed an exquisite little figure in Amy’s stories, the sad fact — which Amy almost certainly did not know — was that Sarah became pregnant out of wedlock at the age of twenty. It is easy to imagine the misery of this in a small country town, where Sarah’s parents were prominent business people. There may have been resistance to marriage by Sarah’s lover or his family, for the couple were wed only fourteen weeks before Amy Lila was born.

Amy’s father, James Currie, came of Scottish farming stock. His father John Currie was ‘fiery’ according to family tales,⁸ while his mother Anne (née Moir) appears to have been a kind and hardworking countrywoman.⁹ James was born in 1863 at Mungle Creek, New South Wales, but soon his parents moved to Queensland, where more children were born. By the 1880s the family had returned to New South Wales and bought a dairy farm at Inverell, where there was a sizeable and clannish Scottish community. Indeed, James had a slight Scottish accent, and throughout his life (his granddaughter Margaret related) he ‘emphasised the Scottish thing’. In appearance he was ‘rather a square sort of man, not terribly tall, but very strong. Sandy, in the Scottish manner’.¹⁰ By nature he would seem to have been a dour, perhaps even harsh man.

Though Sarah had suffered small town scandal and the disapproval of her parents and parents-in-law, she dearly loved her daughter Amy, sewing her garments and dressing her up in pretty frocks. For the first four years of her life, Amy was the sole object of her mother’s petting and attention, but in 1890 Sarah gave birth to another child. This second baby was a boy, named Albert, and over the next eight years, another four sons were born. In later years Amy would frequently tell her own daughters how, after Sarah’s fifth child was born, the doctor told James that if his wife became pregnant again, nothing would save her.¹¹ In a first draft passage of The End of the Morning Clift puts the anger which Amy used to express against her father, and by extension all men and male sexuality, into the dialogue of Cressida’s mother, Grace: ‘Men are swine. Brutes. Vandals! Goths! Scythians! [ … ] He knew that another baby would kill her. He was told that. By the doctor. And yet. Oh the bestial lust of men. He killed her. She was so beautiful’.¹² Following on from her mother’s account Clift, in a non-fiction version of this story, notes that Sarah ‘died of the sixth [child], not putting aside until the last moment of agony the lace she was making to trim [Amy’s] petticoat for market day’.¹³

It is probably true that when dainty little Sarah died in 1899, at the age of thirty-three, it was due to the exhaustion of bearing and nursing baby after baby. However, she did not die in labour, but of heart disease, a year or so after the sixth child was born.¹⁴ That Amy — who was twelve at the time — should remember this death as occurring in childbirth reveals how strongly she resented her father, and also probably her little brothers, who one after another kept on taking the mother’s attention away from the first-born. This would have a marked effect on the way in which Amy would treat her own first-born.

Sarah’s death scarred the young Amy for life. From now on, she would carry a burden of grief and resentment, and would withdraw into herself, finding no need for friends and little use for affection. She would also develop a feeling of repugnance towards sexuality, which would extend into a prudishness about all bodily functions. Yet her mother’s death would also ultimately strengthen Amy and make her independent.

In the aftermath of the tragedy, the children were farmed out to different relatives, and it was Amy’s ‘misfortune to be allotted to her Jewish grandparents’, Charmian later wrote.

They immediately took my mother from school, sacked the maid and put my mother to work. This grieved and angered a young girl mad about learning but she bided her time, read books at night by a candle, and saved every penny she could.¹⁵

Possibly Caroline and Samuel were afraid that if they weren’t strict with this young girl, she might ‘stray’ as Sarah had. They needn’t have worried. While Amy Lila had the ardent nature of her mother, she was earnest and intellectual, and expressed her individuality not by dancing and frivolity but through her ambition to cultivate her mind. A photograph of her at this time shows her in a serge sailor suit, looking — Charmian would remark — like Beth in Little Women.¹⁶ Her looks belied her nature, for there was nothing meek about her. Indeed, if she was like any of the March girls it was her namesake that she most resembled, for Amy Currie, like Amy March, was determined to do well for herself; this included making a good marriage.

In other ways she was more like Jo, and she would scratch away at her writing and lose herself in the world of fiction. Even leaving aside the meanness of her foster home, a country town was no place for a young bluestocking such as this. And so when Amy was about seventeen or eighteen — around 1904 or 1905 — she saved the fare to Sydney and a pound or two extra, and enlisted the help of her favourite brother Albert.

One night she let a sheet down from her window in approved fashion and slid right into the buggy which her brother had standing there, and in a mad midnight dash across the countryside held up the train for Sydney at a siding and set out for adventure [ … ] She skivvied again in a boarding house in Kings Cross, graduated to selling lingerie, and all the time worked at night at shorthand typing until she was accomplished enough to apply for a job. She became a Gallery Girl, she went to concerts and theatres, she wrote romantic verse in secret notebooks, and locked them up in her tin trunk.¹⁷

‘She must have blossomed in those years’, Charmian Clift concludes this telling of the tale. Yet in another essay Clift makes a grimmer and probably more accurate guess as to the reality behind Amy’s heroic story:

My mother used to say that the best time of her life was the period that followed her arrival in Sydney [ … ] She used to tell of it with a wicked glee and an overweening pride in her own audacity. But the facts, the indisputable facts, are that for a year at least she scrubbed floors, emptied slop buckets, waited on tables [ … ], was snubbed and derided and neglected, and lay down to sleep at night in a bed where the bugs lurked.

Surely even the brave glow of audacity must sometimes have been dimmed by sheer sordidness, loneliness, doubt, terror? Panic in the night?¹⁸

But whether afraid at times or not, Amy had managed to escape. Over the next nine or ten years she cultivated her cultural ambitions and improved her education and social position, eventually becoming the receptionist at the Berlitz School of Languages.¹⁹ Meanwhile, in the proper manner of any tale of romance, the life of a man named Sydney Clift was moving him inexorably towards the selfsame boarding house where Amy Currie resided.

To Charmian, growing up with the story of her maternal origins, it seemed that grandmother Sarah had the aura of a beautiful and tragic princess. As the young girl came to learn about her father’s background, she naturally again sought an exotic element. This was provided by a backdrop of the Mysterious East. Charmian’s paternal grandfather, William Clift, was born on 21 June 1865 at Benares in India, where his father Charles Clift was a sergeant in Her Majesty’s 7th Division Grenadiers.²⁰ Of his mother, Mary Clift née Mason, nothing is known except that she was said to have borne ten sons, all of whom grew to be over six feet tall. Most excitingly, as a baby William was bitten on the head by a sacred monkey when his cradle floated off down the flooding Ganges; sixty years later he would delight in showing his grandchildren the scar. And Will’s father, the sergeant, after retiring to cold England, set his beard alight to keep his chest warm rather than drink mutton broth.²¹ Meanwhile, somewhere further back, there was allegedly an ancestor hanged at Tyburn tree for highway robbery.²²

After the monkey, Will’s life appears to have been pretty unexceptional, and it is likely that he was only a child when his parents returned to England, where they settled in Chester. Though Will’s brothers all went off to serve in the army, William himself became a railway clerk; by now his father had become a station master. In September 1886 — the very month when James Currie married Sarah Carson in the Presbyterian church at Inverell — William Clift, aged twenty-one, married a twenty-four year old schoolmistress named Emma Sharman in the Anglican church in the parish of March in Cambridgeshire.²³

Born in the town of March in February 1862, Emma was the daughter of Henry Levi Sharman, at that time a groom and later a baker, and Susannah Sharman, née Crech or possibly Crick.²⁴ Like Sarah Carson, Emma Sharman was short and dainty; in every other way, Charmian’s two grandmothers were chalk and cheese. Thus while Sarah danced through the night with eggshells on her heels, Emma channelled her musical talents into singing contralto in an amateur operetta society. While Sarah sewed lace for her party frocks, Emma dabbled at watercolour landscapes. And while flighty Sarah was obviously quite charming and delightful, Emma was a tartar and a tyrant, and the worst sort of petit-bourgeois snob.

It goes without saying that Emma Sharman would not get pregnant before the wedding ceremony, and so it was in August 1887 — a decent eleven months after her marriage to Will — that she gave birth to Sydney Clift in New Town in the county of Huntingdon.²⁵ She subsequently had another son, whom she named Frank.

Syd’s childhood was not miserable in the way of Amy’s, but nor was it happy. According to the stories that he would later tell his own children, his father Will ‘had beaten him quite savagely and often in boyhood’, for Emma’s motto was ‘Spare the rod and spoil the child’.²⁶ This former schoolteacher exerted her own punishments by nagging and by purse-lipped disapproval, and the whole atmosphere of the home was empty of joy and love. Duty and order were the cornerstones of this domestic edifice: everyone should know his or her place, and stay in it. The worst sin was to presume to ape one’s betters. Syd would rebel in his individual fashion, by pretending to copy what he believed to be the manners of his ‘worsers’.

Perhaps to escape from his restrictive family life, the young Syd took up a variety of sports. Though not as tall as his father and uncles, he did inherit some of the relevant genes from the paternal line of Grenadiers. Indeed, he gave the impression of height, for his upper half was muscular, with arms strengthened from swimming, but the lower part of his body didn’t quite match. ‘He should have been tall and slim and taut’, Charmian would note of his fictional counterpart. ‘Not that he was short, exactly, but he was bulky, muscular, slightly bow-legged’.²⁷ In regard to Syd’s sporting triumphs, Charmian believed her father to have been a county cricketer, and also a water polo star.²⁸ Syd’s elder daughter Margaret added that he had excelled at soccer and marathon swimming, as well as winning cups for skating. In any sporting field, she concluded, ‘It didn’t matter what he attempted to do, he could do it’.²⁹ Although Syd’s daughters exaggerated their father’s achievements, it is true that he was an exceptional natural athlete, with great powers of endurance.

As to Syd’s educational achievements, there are no records. However, he was highly intelligent, with a quick perception and a thirst for knowledge about every possible thing under the sun. In The End of the Morning Grace declares that her husband Tom Morley could easily have got a scholarship to Cambridge but his mother apprenticed him to a trade because that was more fitting to his station in life. However, it is more likely that Syd himself preferred to join the practical, ‘manly’ world of physical work rather than enter the cloisters of academe, and he would not have wished to follow in his father’s footsteps and spend his life working at a desk. Certainly, there was never any suggestion from Syd Clift himself that he was anything but delighted with his chosen trade of engineer, although he would also do fitters’ work and electricians’ work and labourers’ work and anything else he felt like putting his hand to.

It was around the turn of the century when Syd Clift was signed over to the Haslam Foundry and Engineering Company in Derby. As an apprentice he worked an eleven-hour day for seven years, but there was still time for swimming in the Derwent, playing cricket at dinner time with the other lads, going to the YMCA for chess lessons and — a fact which he kept secret from his children — singing in the Anglican church choir.³⁰

Despite these bucolic pleasures, Syd hated the country and people of his birth, later railing against ‘bloody Pommies’ and commenting that living in England was like residing in the heart of a lettuce.³¹ The day he finally got his trade papers — in 1909 — twenty-two year old Syd found himself a job on a refrigeration ship to Australia, and swore never to return.³² Once here, he met another lad from the