Nadia Wheatley : 'The End of the Morning' by Charmian Clift

Next date: Saturday, 01 June 2024 | 02:00 PM to 04:00 PM

Charmian Clift fans will be excited to learn that The End of the Morning, a previously unpublished autobiographical work by Charmian Clift, has been edited by Nadia Wheatley and will be published in May, and that Nadia will be returning to Kiama Library on Saturday 1 June to discuss this new work.

Clift described her work: “The End of the Morning is about a girl called Cressida Morley, who has appeared already in My Brother Jack, but 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.”

Of course, that front picket fence and weatherboard cottage are in Clift’s hometown, Kiama.

This is a Friends of Kiama Library and Kiama & District Historical Society joint event.

Please join us for afternoon tea after the talk, when books will be available for purchase and signing.

Please note, the Pilots Cottage Museum will have free entry on the 1st and 2nd of June so that people can enjoy the Charmian Clift exhibition after the Nadia Wheatley event at the library.

 

$8 FOKL/KDHS members/ $10 guests (includes afternoon tea). Everyone welcome.

Tickets go on sale 1 May and will be available at the library, online, or call 02 4233 1133.

The End of the Morning

'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…'

During the years of the Great Depression, Cressida Morley and her eccentric family live in a weatherboard cottage on the edge of a wild beach. 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?

The End of the Morning is the final and unfinished autobiographical novel by Charmian Clift. Published here for the first time, 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 here alongside a new selection of Clift’s essays and an afterword from her biographer Nadia Wheatley.

Charmian Clift 

Charmian Clift was born in the coastal town of Kiama, New South Wales, 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

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 twenty years it remains the classic account of the life and work of this transformational Australian writer.

When

Location

Kiama Library (upstairs), 7 Railway Parade, Kiama, 2533, View Map