Over 100 Charmian Clift fans gathered at the Kiama Library on Saturday 1 June 2024, to hear Nadia Wheatley, discuss her new work “The End of the Morning”, the final and unfinished autobiographical novel by Charmian Clift. It is the book that Clift herself regarded as her most significant work. 

Although the author did not live to complete it, the typescript left among her papers was fully revised and stands alone as a novella. It is published alongside a new selection of Clift’s essays and an afterword from her biographer Nadia Wheatley.

Wheatley is Clift's long-time advocate, and champion of both the work and the woman. She informs that Clift had produced this wonderful volume about a girl called Cressida Morley, who has appeared already in “My Brother Jack”. 

Kiama Library and Cultural Hubs Manager Michelle Hudson said, “The event sold out within a week and the community is always very supportive of all the Charmian Clift events we run.”

When asked about the appetite for the new book Ms Hudson said, “Everyone was excited about this new book of essays and Nadia’s presentation explored Charmian’s Kiama through a series of old photos and readings from her essays.”

“The main theme of the comments was that this new book will highlight Charmian’s writing again and hopefully many other readers will get enjoyment from her work.”

There is both joy and sadness in reading Charmian Clift's unfinished novel, The End of the Morning, published some 55 years after her death. Clift writes, “In those days the end of the morning was always marked by the quarry whistle blowing the noon knock-off. Since everybody was out of bed very early, morning then was a long time, or even, if you came to think about it, a round time - symmetrical anyway, and contained under a thin, radiant, dome shaped cover...”

Speaking about her character Cressida in The End of the Morning, Clift reveals, “I invented her first and her eccentric family who live in a weatherboard cottage on the edge of a beach. It is a book about young dreams and young longings and filled with sand and sea and sun and wind and seaweed draped on the front picket fence after a storm.”  And of course, we all know that front picket fence and weatherboard cottage are in Kiama - Clift’s hometown.

During the years of the Great Depression, the Morley family were outsiders in their small working-class community. They rant and argue and read books and play music and never feel themselves to be poor. Yet as Cressida moves beyond childhood, she starts to outgrow the place that once seemed the centre of the world. As she plans her escape, the only question is: who will she become?

Sydney writer, Fiona Wright, has said, “’The End of the Morning’ is full of feeling, animated by that formless, aching questioning of childhood, and a fascinating glimpse of the forces that shaped Clift as a person and a writer.” 

Peter Craven, Sydney Morning Herald journalist says, “Reading her, even a glimpsed paragraph of her, is like quaffing the finest champagne on earth.”

Author Richard Cotter says, “'Forthright, funny and with an indefinable flair, Charmian Clift's writing plays second fiddle to nobody”.

Charmian Clift was born in Kiama, on 31 August 1923. After serving as a lieutenant in the Australian Army, she joined the staff of the Melbourne Argus newspaper, and in

1947 married fellow journalist George Johnston. Clift wrote the memoirs ‘Mermaid Singing’ and ‘Peel Me A Lotus’, her two novels, ‘Honour’s Mimic’ and ‘Walk to the Paradise Gardens’, and, for several years, a popular weekly column that appeared in the Melbourne Herald and the Sydney Morning Herald. Charmian Clift died in 1969.

Nadia Wheatley is the editor of ‘Sneaky Little Revolutions: Selected essays of Charmian Clift’, and author of ‘The Life and Myth of Charmian Clift’. Described by critic Peter Craven as ‘one of the greatest Australian biographies’, this was the Age Non-Fiction Book of the Year, 2001, and won the NSW Premier’s Australian History Prize (2002). After 20 years it remains the classic account of the life and work of this transformational Australian writer.