The World of Charmian Clift

By 1969, Charmian Clift had been writing her column for over four years. Week after week, she met the deadline, no matter what was going on in her own life and in the life of her family. Week after week, the column appeared on Thursday in the Sydney Morning Herald, and on Saturday in the Melbourne Herald. And when the columnist’s three weeks of annual leave came due in April of that year, she spent it ‘moonlighting’ — writing some long essays for the progressive Pol magazine, and making a selection of her newspaper columns for a new anthology that had been contracted by the publisher Ure Smith. The author chose over two hundred pages of material before putting the job aside.

This selection formed the basis of The World of Charmian Clift, which George Johnston edited later that year, after Charmian Clift died. ‘Broadly grouped according to subject’ (as Johnston put it), the handsome hardback volume ranged through Nostalgias, People, Places, Problems, Dilemmas, Wanderings, and Conclusions, with spidery pen-and-ink drawings by Clift’s elder son, Martin Johnston, demarcating these sections. The sombre tones of the cover portrait, painted posthumously by artist Ray Crooke, seemed to express the grief that the author’s friends and fans were feeling, but it did not suggest the exuberance and passion that imbued the essays, right to the end.

This sense was conveyed by broadcaster Allan Ashbolt in his obituary in the Sydney Morning Herald, which is quoted in the Introduction to The World of Charmian Clift:

Although she was a disciplined journalist-novelist, with a fine command of her craft, one tends to remember Charmian Clift less as a writer than as a person — or rather a person for whom writing was merely a way of expressing her own conscience, her own sense of moral values, her own passion for social justice, and above all her own lyrical delight in being alive and belonging to the human race.

When Charmian died, one of her ‘Thursday ladies’ wrote to the Sydney Morning Herald saying that ‘Thursday won't be Thursday any more’.  For readers such as this woman, and for the men and women who carried clippings of their favourite Clift columns, folded and brittle, in their wallets and purses, The World of Charmian Clift offered a way to enjoy Thursday (or Saturday, if they lived in Melbourne) any day of the week.

Photograph L: This photograph of Charmian at the family dinner table was taken by Andrew Jakubowicz, a friend whom Martin invited home to do a photo shoot in April 1969.

Photograph R: Contact sheet by the photographer accompanying journalist Clifford Tolchard, who interviewed Clift and Johnston at home in December 1968. This shows the many moods Charmian could express in a matter of minutes. The image top right was the basis for Ray Crook’s portrait, painted posthumously for the cover of The World of Charmian Clift.