Charmian Clift was born on 30 August 1923 in the last of a straggle of weatherboard workers' cottages on the outskirts of the New South Wales coastal township of Kiama. Both socially and geographically, the little settlement of North Kiama was regarded by the townsfolk as being on the wrong side of the tracks. But when Charmian was a young child, this was ‘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. 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.’

By the time Charmian was a teenager, this sense of living on the outside made her determined 'to get out into the big bad world and do something better than anyone else could do'.

It was beauty rather than brains that brought her escape. In May 1941, a photograph of Charmian in a swimsuit won a Beach Girl competition run by Pix magazine. With the money, she was able to move to Sydney 'on the search for glamour'. This first foray into the world led to disaster. At the end of 1942, the nineteen-year-old gave birth to an illegitimate child; under pressure from family, the young mother offered her daughter for adoption.

A year later, Charmian made a fresh start by enlisting in the Australian Women's Army Service. Given the task of editing a news sheet for the Ordnance Corps, the vivacious young service woman soon attracted the attention of Brigadier Sir Errol Knox, who in civilian life was managing director of Melbourne's Argus newspaper. She joined his staff as soon as she was demobilised.

On one of her first days at her new job she met the colleague regarded as the newspaper’s ‘Golden Boy’. Now thirty-three, George Johnston had been one of Australia’s leading war correspondents, covering conflicts in Asia and the Pacific. The chemistry ignited between this charismatic older man and this magnetic young woman instantly became 'the scandale of the office'. When Charmian Clift was summarily dismissed, George Johnston resigned in protest.

This was the beginning of a partnership that would continue through twenty-three years, thirty books, and three children. By the time they married, in August 1947, their first child was well on the way and their first collaborative novel was finished. When it won a major literary award, the newspaper headline announced ‘JOURNALIST, WIFE WIN NOVEL PRIZE’. Throughout her subsequent literary career, Clift would continue to be treated as her husband’s helpmeet.

At this point I should have taken wings and started to fly but at this point also, of course, I was involved in having children. I think those are terribly difficult years for a young woman, and for a young woman who wants to write or paint or anything else, even more so.

Like many women of her generation, Charmian Clift struggled with the practical difficulties of combining a career with the responsibilities of a housewife and mother. And how could she balance freedom with her love for her children and husband? This dilemma was at the core of the ground-breaking ABC radio play, ‘Diary of a Modern Woman’ which Clift wrote as early as 1949.

For both Clift and Johnston, the political conservatism of Australia under Prime Minister Menzies was anathema. After exchanging Sydney for London in 1951, three years later the couple took their two children and their two typewriters to the island of Kalymnos — a barren and isolated place where sponge diving was the only source of income. As George worked on a novel and Martin and Shane (now aged seven and five) settled into their new school, Charmian began to write a journal. Within a few weeks, this would develop into travel memoir, Mermaid Singing — completed by the end of that first Greek summer.

As winter approached, the family moved to the breathtakingly beautiful island of Hydra, only three hours from Athens on the daily ferry service. In March 1956, the couple sealed their commitment to Greece by buying a house, where their third child, Jason, was born in early April. This Hydra house would be the family's home for the next nine years. 

I think that after that second year we began to really build a life for ourselves and it was a wonderful sort of life, in a way.  For the first time in my life, apart from the time when I was a very young girl, I found time to do my own writing, I found time for a social life, I found time to look after my family properly.  The days are very long there and life is very easy, very wonderful. 

In Hydra’s small and tightly-knit community of artists and expatriates, Charmian Clift felt like an insider for the first time in her life.

Although always a painstakingly slow writer, in this sustaining environment she completed a second memoir of island life — Peel Me a Lotus — and followed this over the next few years with the novels Walk to the Paradise Gardens (set in Kiama) and Honour's Mimic (set on the island of Kalymnos).

Through these years in Greece, George Johnston's health deteriorated as a result of the tuberculosis he had contracted during the war. In the autumn of 1962, believing that he might have time for only one more book, he made a start on a novel inspired by his experience of growing up in Melbourne at the time of the First World War and Great Depression. Putting aside her own autobiographical novel, Charmian sat on the step of the room where he worked and — as Johnston recalled — ‘Through that entire winter we talked and talked and remembered and remembered and I wrote My Brother Jack.’

This novel provided a ticket home for George, who returned alone for the book's launch at the Adelaide Festival in March 1964. When Charmian and the three children arrived in Australia a few months later, a former newspaper colleague invited her to write 'some regular pieces' for his newspaper. Johnston later observed that ‘He was not at all sure what these pieces were to be... sort of essays, he thought... anything she liked. He explained that he was not looking for a woman journalist, but a writer. The daily press needed some writing, real writing, from a woman's point of view.’

For Charmian Clift, this invitation was a job description made in heaven. In these ‘sneaky little revolutions’, as Clift once called them, she supported the rights of women and migrants, called for social justice for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people, opposed conscription and the war in Vietnam, acknowledged Australia’s role in the Asia-Pacific, fought censorship, called for a local film industry — and much more. In doing so, she established the body of the work that recently caused critic Peter Craven to describe her as ‘the greatest essayist this country has produced’.

But the column came with a high personal cost.  Charmian Clift was a very private writer, and an even more private person. Exposing herself to the reading public undermined her deepest reserves. As well — as she noted in ‘On Being Unable to Write an Article’ — she had each week to deal with a ‘chronic recurring paralysis of the talent’, with ‘the most terrible feeling, of panic and desolation, of terror, of the most awful loss’.

This was not the only burden the writer was carrying through these Sydney years. As her husband underwent two long periods in hospital followed by convalescence at home, she was his primary carer. She was also the family breadwinner. These commitments meant that her own autobiographical novel, The End of the Morning, had to be put aside again and yet again.

In an essay titled ‘What are you doing it for?’, Charmian Clift wrote: ‘A whole human life of struggle, bravery, defeat, triumph, hope, and despair, might be remembered, finally, for one drunken escapade.’

Her own such escapade was a cry for help that no one heard.

On the night 8 July 1969, after drinking a great deal, Charmian Clift took an overdose of sleeping tablets. Her diary for the coming week was full of engagements, ranging from lunch and an art gallery opening with friends to taking part in a walkathon to raise money for an Aboriginal charity. She had just had her second flu injection, and she had booked a pap smear examination with her GP for the next Monday. Clearly, Charmian was looking to the future — when despair momentarily overwhelmed her.

Yet her message remains one of the affirmation of life.

Charmian Clift did what so many people would like to do, but are not brave enough to dare. She went into exile rather than live in a society that stifled her. She sacrificed security for art. She embraced openness, freedom and social justice. She was an optimist, a self-proclaimed ‘Yea-sayer’. As she wrote in Peel Me a Lotus, at a time when it seemed impossible to keep on living in Greece, and living as a writer:

Ask nothing of it and the soul retires, the flame of life flickers, burns lower, expires for want of air. Here, in the midst of all our difficulties, life burns high. Though it seems sometimes that we make no progress towards the ideal, yet the ideal exists, and our energies are directed towards it.

For more information see Nadia Wheatley, The Life and Myth of Charmian Clift, HarperCollins, 2001.

This is available from the author’s website, www.nadiawheatley.com, where you will also find biographical articles about Charmian Clift.