The End of the Morning by Charmian Clift, edited by Nadia Wheatley, NewSouth Books.
'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.'
Australian journalist and writer Charmian Clift wrote these words of the time just after she and her husband, fellow Australian journalist, writer and former war correspondent George Johnston, had won a Sydney Morning Herald novel prize for their collaborative work High Valley in 1948. Her words express the challenges of a literary marriage in the 20th century, and the fraught nature of being a woman with a writer’s soul who is constrained by the demands of family and short on the luxuries of time and space.
Johnston went on to become famous for his autobiographical novel My Brother Jack, which appeared in 1964 and won the Miles Franklin prize for that year. Clift had suspended her own writing work in order to help Johnston recall the early life that he wanted to recreate in his novel, and Johnston eventually acknowledged her support, suggesting that the novel was ‘really Charmian’s book’.
Post-war, Clift and Johnston had left Australia for London, and then went to Greece in 1954: they lived first on Kalymnos and then on Hydra. They lived for and on writing and collaborated on several novels in-between producing short stories and journalism. Johnston wrote My Brother Jack, viewed by many as being a masterpiece, while living on Hydra. On the couple’s return to Sydney, Clift once again suspended work on The End of the Morning in order to help support the couple’s three children: over the next five years she wrote about 225 pieces for The Sydney Morning Herald. (These pieces also appeared in the Melbourne Herald, which is where I read at least some of them.)
Clift and Johnston lived life intensely, and by the time they returned to Australia, Johnston was very ill with tuberculosis, but continued working. My Brother Jack was the first book in a proposed trilogy with an autobiographical basis. The second book was Clean Straw for Nothing, and featured Clift’s alter ego, Cressida Morley. By this time Clift was an admired and very public figure, and she apparently feared the possible