Kiama exhibits its literary jewel

Changing from rage to play

Kiama’s wonderful Blowhole

Sends up a fountain of spray

Whenever a storm is raging,

And the sea is dull and grey,

The water spouts up in a torrent

And moans as it sinks away.

But when the sun is shining,

And the waves rush through

and play,

Rainbows sprinkled with

diamonds

Gleam in the falling spray.’’

Charmian Clift was just eight years old when her poem about the most famous feature of her home town was published in the Kiama Independent.

Her gift as a writer was obvious, but little could she have imagined that 81 years later her birthplace would be celebrating her life and career as Kiama’s most famous cultural figure just 200m from its most famous natural feature, the Blowhole.

The Kiama and District Historical Society is staging an exhibition, Charmian Clift: Her life, her loves and her tragic end, all year in the Pilot’s Cottage museum overlooking the town’s harbour.

Malcolm Bedford, Heather Bell and Sue Eggins put it together and it’s well worth a look for anyone with the slightest interest in Australian literature.

Clift was born in Kiama in 1923. The exhibition explains that, after a few false starts at different careers, she became one of Australia’s most successful writers.

She produced a string of books, a highly popular series of newspaper essays and a script for an acclaimed 10-part television series between 1949 and her tragic death from an overdose of barbiturates in 1969.

My personal favourite has always been The Sponge Divers, a novel Clift wrote with her husband George Johnston (author of the Miles Franklin Award-winning My Brother Jack) while they were living on the Greek island of Kalymnos in 1954

The book tells the story of the island’s divers who risked their lives for the then valuable sponges that grew on the seabed of the eastern Mediterranean.

It is a wonderfully evocative book about the lives and loves, of the people of the island and the men’s dangerous livelihood.

It also draws from the romantic lives of the authors, who fled conservative post-war Australia where Clift’s affair with the married Johnston had led to them both being sacked from their jobs at the Argus in Melbourne.

They went first to London, then the Greek islands, where they lived for 10 years.

They were at the vanguard of an international artistic community in the Greek islands in the 1950s and ’60s. Their visitors included Australian artist Sidney Nolan and a young Canadian poet, Leonard Cohen.

They returned to Sydney in 1964 when My Brother Jack was published, to widespread acclaim. Clift began contributing beautifully crafted essays to the Sydney Morning Herald and Melbourne Herald and wrote the script for the television series of My Brother Jack.

Clift was just 45 when she died. The Kiama exhibition, while celebrating her talent, also deals with her troubled soul and alcohol problems.

The museum is open from 11am-3pm Friday-Monday. Make sure you leave enough time to listen to the riveting 25-minute interview Clift recorded for the National Library.

One of her comments says it all: “I was young enough to see all this as a novel, and me in character.”