Trouble in Lotus Land

Within a couple of weeks of the start of the Clift column, readers began writing letters to the author, addressed via her newspaper publishers. This evidence of her popularity brought about a change in Charmian Clift’s working arrangements.

For the first eight months, she wrote her pieces on a freelance basis, submitting them to the Melbourne Herald, from which the Sydney Morning Herald purchased republication rights. But around the middle of 1965, the managing director of the Sydney Morning Herald had the bright idea of putting Clift on the payroll.

Although the Clift column was well to the left of the editorial policy of the Fairfax-owned Sydney Morning Herald, Charmian Clift attracted readers, and this helped sell the newspaper’s advertising space. In September 1965, the department store Grace Bros bought a large and regular advertising space in the Sydney Morning Herald Women’s Pages, specifying that its advertisements were to be placed near the Clift column.

This support from a major advertising subscriber, coupled with the volume of the columnist’s mail, strengthened Charmian Clift's editorial freedom. As the turbulent decade of the Sixties sped on, she voiced the discontent that was simmering among the middle aged and middle class Australians who lived in the suburbs. These people did not go in political demonstrations. Nevertheless, as her essay ‘Trouble in Lotus Land’ (published in August 1967) affirmed:

There are a great many citizens who are both angry and troubled, and this concern is spread through a more varied strata of society than I had ever supposed…. Women’s Rights, Aboriginal Rights, Pensions, Unmarried Mothers, Education, Foreign Capital, Homosexuality, Litter, Immigration, Urban Pollution, Censorship, Noise, Conscription, Housing… Not to mention Her Majesty the Queen.

When George Johnston edited the posthumous collection The World of Charmian Clift, he observed Some of her best pieces I have had reluctantly to discard on the grounds of topicality. These included essays on many of these issues that were making Australians ‘troubled’.

George Johnston’s decision was right at the time. But as time went on, Clift’s ‘topical’ and more political pieces developed their own particular significance, as a kind of ‘vox pop’ of Australian attitudes during the period of transformation leading into the ‘It’s Time’ election of Gough Whitlam.

In 1990, Charmian Clift’s biographer, Nadia Wheatley, compiled all the ‘pieces’ that had been left out of Images in Aspic and The World of Charmian Clift in the two companion volumes, Trouble in Lotus Land and Being Alone with Oneself. Her introduction to Trouble in Lotus Land sets the essays in the context of their time.

These volumes are out of print, but a number of the essays can be found in Sneaky Little Revolutions.

Photograph L: Clift’s essay ‘On the Right of Dissent’ (published 1 August 1968) was illustrated with images of the ‘protestant’ Martin Luther, and his modern namesake, Martin Luther King Junior. These images were in turn flanked by the Grace Bros fashion models.

Photograph R: George and Martin Johnston read one of Clift’s typescripts, looking over the author’s shoulder.