Mermaid Singing

Mermaid Singing, is available in a bind-up edition with Peel me a Lotus, published by HarperCollins. Click here or on the book cover image below to purchase.

In 1951, Charmian and George exchanged the conservative and claustrophobic Australia they both loathed for London. For George, the move represented an exciting and prestigious job opportunity as head of the European office of a major Australian newspaper corporation. For Charmian, there was the belief that surely now she would find the Big Thing she had always sought. Three years later, both were disillusioned. And so in December 1954 the couple abandoned job security and a posh lifestyle, and set off to try their luck as full time writers on the remote and poverty-stricken Greek island of Kalymnos.

How to say that we were looking for a mermaid? Charmian wondered when the locals asked why she had come to the island. This metaphorical mermaid, borrowed from T.S. Eliot’s poem ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’, stands for the spiritual element that she’d felt to be missing from the family’s privileged life in London.

How to explain that we were civilisation sick, asphalt and television sick, that we had lost our beginnings and felt a sort of hollow that we had not been able to fill up with material success. We had come to Kalymnos to seek a source, or a wonder, or a sign, to be reassured in our humanity.

Within weeks, Clift’s journal-observations of the islanders and their culture began to develop into her first solo book. Completed by the end of the coming summer on Kalymnos, Mermaid Singing is the first expression of the author’s unique lyric voice. As a travel book, it was also unique. Forty years later, American writer Frances Mayes would hit the bestseller lists with her memoir Under the Tuscan Sun, but in the mid-1950s people did not want to read about life in a foreign country as seen from a woman’s point of view. Published in the United States in 1956 and in England two years later, Mermaid Singing got rave reviews, but sales were so low that the book soon went out of print. It would not even be published in Australia until 1970 — a year after the author’s death.

Now, as Charmian Clift is being discovered by a new generation of readers, the book has been newly published in Britain and Australia. Most extraordinary of all, in 2022 it was translated into Greek, Spanish and Catalan.

Photograph L: In this publicity photo, taken in the summer of 1954by artist Cedric Flower, Charmian and George pose in their Kalymnos home with Sevasti Taktikou, Charmian’s mentor and friend.

Photograph R: Charmian and George at a Kaymnos carfe with Shane and Martin. Summer 1954.