Bombo's famous 'green-eyed gunner with sand between her toes'

Illawarra has had its share of military boffins – including Robert Haylock Owen (1862-1927) who ended up Chief Staff Officer of the New Zealand Local Forces and his brother Percy Thomas Owen (1864-1936), military and civil engineer.

Readers may have even heard of the much-lauded Owen gunslinger named Evelyn.

But I doubt any of the Owen family could ever have produced what could today be considered a must-read line of prose.

Not so the Kiama girl, Charmian Clift (aka “Cressida Morley”), who even makes a cameo appearance in the classic Australian novel, My Brother Jack – for which Charmian eventually wrote the screenplay for the ABC TV mini-series in 1965.

Big achievements – yes – but no-one else has ever written quite so well about the Illawarra region as the woman from Bombo (born in 1924) who was the daughter of Syd Clift, the manager of the local quarry.

In the 1960s Charmian Clift became almost impossibly famous and well-read in NSW through her brilliant weekly columns that delighted thousands of Australians and had advertisers begging to have their wares flogged close to her byline.

Although Charmian’s mother – Amy Lila, nee Currie – organised for her daughter to attend both Kiama Public and Wollongong High schools, Charmian (as her devoted biographer Nadia Wheatley explains) “attributed her education to her parents’ love for books, and to the wild beach and little valley that bounded her home”.

But it was military service that set Charmian on the path to becoming the finest Illawarra-born writer the region has ever known.

Enlisting in the Australian Women’s Army Service on 27 April 1943, Clift served with the 15th Australian Heavy Anti-Aircraft Battery in Sydney and was commissioned lieutenant in August 1944 and worked as an orderly officer at Land Headquarters, Melbourne.

And there, while editing an army magazine, she began to write and publish short stories, eventually working for the Melbourne newspaper, The Argus, where she had an affair with the already married and much older writer George Johnston.

The couple eloped, first to Kiama, then to London and on to years of living on the Greek island of Hydra before returning to NSW in 1964.

But unlike most writers – whose time burns brightly and then dims – today Charmian Clift’s fame has once again hit the big time.

Credit for this resurgence of Charmian’s fame must first go to Nadia Wheatley’s fine 2001 biography, The Life and Myth of Charmian Clift, and also Nadia’s extensive contribution to the marvellous film documentary, Life Burns High, that was recently screened to sell-out crowds at the 2024 Sydney Film Festival.

Nadia Wheatley (along with the film’s director and co-producer) also joined the Q&A post-screening discussion at the November 2024 Coledale Writer’s Festival, thereby further illuminating Charmian’s life.

Currently all this is topped off by the TV series, So Long, Marianne (about Charmian and George’s life on the island of Hydra with Leonard Cohen and Marianne Ihlen) currently screening and available at SBS On Demand.

I first encountered the writing of Nadia Wheatley way back when she wrote her pioneering study of the eviction riots in Sydney during the Great Depression.

Nadia, for a time, also lived with Charmian Clift’s son, the poet Martin Johnston, but it is her illumination of both the myths that still surround Clift and the importance of Bombo and Kiama for Charmian’s life that has made her a most sensitive biographer.

Charmian’s books, Mermaid Singing (1956) and Peel Me A Lotus (1959), are themselves wonders but it’s her descriptions of the landscape of Kiama in her novel, Walk to the Paradise Gardens (1960), that will likely excite most Illawarra readers.

Who else but Charmian is better capable of evoking the essence of 1930s Illawarra?

“My late father, a dogmatic man and something of an armchair philosopher, used to be given to say – among other trenchant pronouncement – that the air of our hometown would be worth a quid a whiff if some quack could bottle it and get out a patent.”

It was air Charmian Clift declared was characterised as “something between tangy and sweet, such clean country air, spiced with smells of kelp and clover and cow-dun, mixtures of sea-brine and rich loam turned in the sun”.

“The green-eyed gunner with sand between her toes” are the words Nadia Wheatley once used to describe the girl who so loved Bombo Beach she would moon-bathe there in the hope she would turn silver.

And, for my money, Wheatley’s words are right up there with the literary quality of the fine prose Charmian Clift was so often capable of producing – even in the end of the morning, her final, unfinished autobiographical novel.