Sneaky Little Revolution
AT BOMBO, a beach at Kiama on the mid-south coast of New South Wales, between the carpark and the railway line, there is a small park dedicated to the memory of Charmian Clift. I discovered it in October last year when Jodie and I took the dogs for a run on the beach—part of Bombo is set aside for dogs to run off their leads. The park is small, and the rail line, elevated at that point, blocks the view, the sheoaks might otherwise have of the sea. It made me a little sad that a woman so elegant and farsighted, so associated in my mind with Mediterranean and desert, should be so hedged in and overshadowed in her afterlife.
But one’s glad she’s remembered here. Anywhere. Charmian Clift, famous around the world in her day—an inspiration to Leonard Cohen, for instance—is one of our finest essayists and most elegant prose stylists, though she is overlooked these days. She was born, as I recall, not far from this beach, or somewhere along the coal coast here. I came to know and admire her work in the late 1990s, well after her too early demise, when HarperCollins published a biography of Clift by Nadia Wheatley, and alongside it a collection of her essays (edited by Wheatley). Among the many lovely essays in that collection, I loved especially “The Centre,” written in the early 1960s on a trip to Alice Springs with Russell Drysdale. I have been teaching that essay since I discovered it, and I included it in my anthology of place writing, A Place on Earth, published by New South in 2003.
And yet, the tenderness of the pinks, the soft glow of the reds, the dulcet beige, and violet seeping in. The landscape, after all, is alluring beyond reason. Voluptuous, even. You could abandon yourself to it and die in a dream… Such unearthly beauty, one knows—and still yearns—is fatal, It is a landscape for saints and mystics and madmen.
And again, with a survivor’s guilt, with an apprehension of Indigenous wisdom uncommon in her time and with a sense of responsibility for the theft of land that was even less usual:
I want to say, “I’m sorry.” Apologise. Absolve myself, I want to tell them that I was not one of those maddened lice of explorers crawling to the discovery of their magic tribal place. I did not personally dispossess them of the ranges and the gorges and he waterholes and he caves where the Huns leave beer cans now, and crumpled paper tissues, and dubious identities chipped into the ancient rock. I did not personally disinherit them of the most sophisticated, ethereal concept of origin that ever a people dreamed. Their blood, for all I know, might be bluer than our heaven. But here in the thriving Alice the guilt hurts intolerably. What are the dreaming people dreaming now?
Justice, I think, and the same dreaming wisdom they dreamed then.
All this comes to mind because in my essay on Clift’s work (and Wheatley’s biography), for The Bulletin, it seems I wrote these words:
From the women’s pages of the Sydney Morning Herald, among advertisements for wrinkle cream and mini-skirts … Clift challenged a complacent society, fashioned a sly and elegant sedition: opposing Vietnam, unmasking materialism, championing equality for women.
I had forgotten writing that analysis until I was contacted this morning by New South to ask if they might use them on the back cover of a new book, a selection of Charmian Clift’s essays, edited by Wheatley, later this year. And it strikes me, as I read those words of mine—especially “sly and elegant sedition”—and notice the title Wheatley has given the selection (Sneaky Little Revolutions), how much we need Clift’s voice today, how much more powerful would be a revolution—for the planet, for reconciliation, for women’s rights, for peace and humanity—spoken with the vulnerability and lyric restraint Clift practised. Well, We need all voices, and we need rage, intolerance, and impatience, and we need a lot of radical action now: for climate justice, for social justice, for democracy, for liberty. But the kind of sedition that sticks, the kind of resistance that prevails is more often measured and poetic, quietly spoken and humane, than it is shrill. I’m thinking Mother Teresa, Aung San Suu Kyi, Martin Luther King, Mahatma Gandhi, Nelson Mandela, James Baldwin. And in her sly and elegant, dignified and personable manner, Charmian Clift.
I’m pretty sure we get nowhere fast coining clangorous cliches—gaslighting, domestic terror, woke, privilege—and hitting each other with them. Clift’s writing offers a masterclass in the kind of justice that will never be done without poetry and other literatures and the kind of minds that make them.
