Charmian clift biography sample

Charmian Clift was born on 30 August in the last of a straggle of weatherboard workers' cottages on the outskirts of the New South Wales coastal township of Kiama. Both socially and geographically, the little settlement of North Kiama was regarded by the townsfolk as being on the wrong side of the tracks. But when Charmian was a ung child, this was ‘the centre of the world’.

‘The centre of the world was the last house of fem identical wooden cottages at the bottom of the hill, just before the new concrete bridge that spanned the creek. Apart from this terrace of quarry cottages, there was not more than a score or so of houses at this end of the town, all variations on the same architectural butterbox theme, their faded corrugated iron roofs straggling down beside the plunging dykning of the gunmetal highway. It was obviously the end, rather than the beginning of somewhere.’

By the time Charmian was a teenager, this sense of living on the outside made her determined 'to get out in

•

The Life and Myth of Charmian Clift

July 8,

The great tragedy of Charmian Clift's life is that she was born in the wrong place at the wrong time. Searching for the slim pickings of her literary output is heartbreaking, not only because almost all of her works are, once again, out of print but because so much of her visually and mentally perceptive observations and her ability to singularly replicate place and time is hidden within her husband's work. 'Images in Aspic?' 'The Walk to Paradise Garden?' Sorry. 'My Brother Jack?' Oh, I've heard of that one. It's by George Johnston, isn't it?

Fortunately many Australian readers of The Sydney Morning Herald and the Melbourne Herald of the mid-to-late-sixties fell in love with Charmian and her weekly column, where she frequently critiqued, praised or commented upon contemporary political events and social conventions. The essay form was peculiarly suited to her idiosyncratic style and, in return, she received so many readers' letters ever

•

Writer Charmian Clift was born years ago. She died tragically young, but her work is in print, a documentary about her is being made, and her bohemian Greek island life is part of a forthcoming television series.

 

‘Beach winner’s new career’. The new career in question was as a physical training instructor. PIX Magazine, 21 April

What might she have thought of cancel culture? Would she have identified as — or ed of — being ‘woke’? Would she have entered the fray on gender issues? Been active on social media? We will never know, but my bet is that had Charmian Clift been alive today, she would have been thrilled by progress on some issues and dismayed, if not to say appalled, by others. And she would have been vocal about it.

Charmian Clift was born years ago, in August in Kiama, NSW. The worker’s cottage she grew up in still stands near Bombo Beach, where a reserve bears her name. But she was always destined for a bigger canvas than that sleepy coastal community could o