Charmian Clift

Charmian Clift – a legendary Australian writer and a newspaper columnist, and a rebel who cared nothing for convention – was a Kiama girl.

She was born in Kiama in 1923. Her father was a supervisor at the Bombo Headland Quarry and she grew up in a modest quarry workers’ cottage at the southern end of Hothersall Street. Her childhood home is still there and a nearby reserve is named in her honour.

Charmian was a talented student at Kiama Public School in the late 1920s and early 1930s. Even then she was exhibiting exceptional writing skills as this poem about the Kiama Blowhole, published in the Kiama Independent in 1933, illustrates:

Forever in storm or sunshine,
Changing from rage to play,
Kiama's wonderful Blowhole
Sends up a fountain of spray.
Whenever a storm is raging,
And the sea is dull and grey,
The water spouts up in a torrent
And moans as it sinks away.
But when the sun is shining,
And the waves rush through and play,
Rainbows sprinkled with diamonds
Gleam in the falling spray.

Charmian was ‘discovered’ in May 1941 when she won Pix magazine’s NSW Beach Girl Quest. (Pix was a popular weekly magazine, known for its cover girls often posed in a swimsuit.)

That led to her moving to Sydney where she became a model to supplement her main job as an usherette at a Kings Cross theatre.

In 1942, aged 19, she became pregnant. She surrendered the child for adoption.

In April 1943, Charmian enlisted in the Australian Army, becoming a Lieutenant in charge of a group of gunners in Drummoyne, Sydney.

While editing an army magazine, she began to write and publish short stories. In 1946, she joined the staff of the Argus newspaper (then Australia’s leading daily newspaper) and met war correspondent George Johnston. Their employer disapproved of their relationship, so Charmian was summarily dismissed; George resigned in protest.

Johnston moved to Sydney to work as a journalist, and, following his divorce, he and Charmian Clift were married in August 1947. Unable to find accommodation in Sydney, Charmian stayed with her parents in Kiama and George would catch the train to Kiama on weekends where they would work together on a novel, High Valley. This won a £2,000 Sydney Morning Herald novel prize – one of the very few literary prizes available at the time.

Early in 1951 Charmian, George and their son and daughter relocated to London, and then in late 1954 to the Greek Islands. Here they were to live a somewhat hedonistic and bohemian life, George writing ‘My Brother Jack’ and Charmian writing ‘Mermaid Singing’ and ‘Peel Me a Lotus’, both of which were highly successful books.

Charmain’s first novel ‘Walk to the Paradise Gardens’ (1960) is set in her childhood Kiama (called Lebanon Bay in the book), and ‘The End of the Morning’ (which she never finished and was first published only in April 2024) is an autobiographical novel also set in Kiama.

Between 1964 and 1969 Charmian contributed 240 essays to the Sydney Morning Herald and The Herald in Melbourne. These were published in a regular weekly column that attracted a large and devoted readership of (as she described them) her ‘Thursday ladies’.

These essays were originally intended to be ‘real writing from a woman’s point of view’, but the subjects they encompassed were occasionally very topical, political and feminist. For example, Charmian railed against Australia’s involvement in the Vietnam War and conscription, highlighted Australia’s ‘sexual apartheid in employment, wages, social standing and moral judgments’, counted civil rights activist Faith Bandler as a friend and so urged her readers to vote Yes in the 1967 referendum to give recognition to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders, and even suggested that an apology to Australia’s First Nations peoples was long overdue.

Charmian died in Sydney in 1969 either by taking an overdose of barbiturates while considerably affected by alcohol or from suicide prompted by the impending publication of Johnston's novel ‘Clean Straw for Nothing’, which Charmian knew would lay bare her infidelities on the Greek island of Hydra.