Sneaky Little Revolutions

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In the first of her column pieces, the writer assessed her impressions gained over the first two months in her homeland. In the short time since her return, Clift noted, she had been told 'over and over again' with a certain complacency: 'The old place has changed quite a bit since you saw it last.' Turning this statement into a series of questions, the essayist asked: Had Australia really changed since the immediate post-war period? If so, how? Explaining that what she was looking for was ‘evidence of a spiritual change’, she went on to declare that the country’s goal should not be a borrowed culture, but ‘an Australian way of life developed naturally from its landscape, climate and its own heritage’.

Despite a certain level of disappointment, this newly-arrived migrant felt there was also a sense of 'imminence' — as if something was about to happen in Australia. A year later, the author summed up this sense this sense of being on the brink of change in a letter to her London literary agent:       

This has all been so new and so invigorating in a mad sort of way. I think I like it. At least it is a country where you can still make things happen instead  of waiting for them to happen. I have been making my own sneaky little revolutions [...] by writing essays for the weekly presses to be read by people who don't know an essay from a form-guide, but absolutely love it.

The columnist’s ‘sneaky little revolutions’ became more and more radical as the Sixties raced on. Her first piece for 1966, 'On a Lowering Sky in the East', revealed a new strength of political concern in response to Australian’s growing commitment to the Vietnam War. Long before the word ‘multiculturalism’ was coined, the columnist spoke up for the people who were then called ‘migrants’ or ‘New Australians’. Supporting her friend, Faith Bandler, she urged readers to vote YES in the 1967 referendum on Aboriginal civil rights.

But she also wrote about her travels to the Centre and the North, and there were what could be called traditional essay topics, such as ‘The Sounds of Summer’, ‘The Magic of Mornings’, and ‘The Joys of a City’. Overall, readers opening their newspapers to the Clift column would not know whether they would get the political, the domestic, or the pastoral. The unexpectedness was part of the appeal.

This selection, by the author’s biographer Nadia Wheatley, gives a broad sample of Charmian Clift’s concerns and interests. Drawn from the four existing anthologies of Charmian Clift's essays — Images in Aspic (1965), The World of Charmian Clift  (1970), Trouble in Lotus Land (1990) and Being Alone with Oneself  (1991) — the book’s chronological arrangement allows it to be read this as a kind of memoir of final years of the author’s life.

Photograph L: Page from the author’s notebook, with the questions she wanted to ask the prawn-fishers during her visit to Karumba on ;ate 1967. Although Clift’s career as a journalist was short, it was good training for the essayist.

Photograph R: This was taken in the same photo shoot as the image used for the cover of Sneaky Little Revolutions. Her direct gaze seems to meet the eye of the viewer.