Life on the West Island - Life Burns high

This week, the Travelling Sydney Film Festival came to our part of the West Island, and we attended the opening night showing of one of this year’s most popular films – Life Burns High.

This documentary chronicles the life of one of the nation’s best – and most enigmatic - female writers, Charmian Clift. She was the wife of celebrated author George Johnston, winner of the 1957 Miles Franklin Award, established in the will of author Stella Miles Franklin (known for My Brilliant Career). It rewards a novel "of the highest literary merit" that presents "Australian life in any of its phases".

The documentary film builds on the brilliant biography of Charmian Clift by Nadia Wheatley (The Life and Myth of Charmian Clift), which revealed that much of Johnston’s work was written in partnership with Charmian Clift, who also did the majority of the typing, editing and proofreading. In fact, Clift is credited as co-author of three books with Johnston in the years leading up to 1957, but the Mies Franklin Award was credited to Johnston alone. Clift, however, wrote ten other books and also became a celebrated newspaper columnist.

Charmian Clift was born in 1923 in Kiama, a beachside town some 120km south of Sydney. Although Kiama is now regarded as a beach, surfing and fishing resort, at the time of Clift’s birth it was better known as a large quarry site. It shipped millions of tonnes of crushed basalt for use as a base in many of Sydney’s roads of the time. Clift’s father was chief engineer of the largest quarry on the town’s northern boundary. Unlike other executives of the quarrying company, he chose to live in a modest miner’s cottage near Bombo Beach, within walking distance of the quarry, not wishing to be separated from his men. Consequently, the family was looked down upon by some of the respectable middle-class residents of Kiama. But in their early years, Charmian and her siblings loved the beach and learned to swim, surf and enjoy seaside life.

The documentary takes up her story, as summarised by the Sydney Film Festival:

Early on in Life Burns High, the new documentary about the trailblazing Australian writer Charmian Clift, we learn about her early love of being photographed and watched, posing and swimming on the jagged periphery of her seaside village. She took joy in being exposed to others and to the elements; in one of the film’s interviews, her biographer Nadia Wheatley describes her tendency to lie naked in rockpools as a child during the evenings, ‘star-baking’ in hopes of turning silver. Clift was fascinated by glamour, the epitome of which she envisioned as owning “a white car with red upholstery,” and yearned to be a “film star” (“not an actress,” she clarifies). She submitted a photo of herself to a national magazine contest in a swimsuit—back arched, balanced on curled toes like a dancer— which secured her a modelling contract in Sydney. In rare snatches of live-action footage of Clift, her voice has a theatrical timbre and an unplaceable accent; her eyes convey a serene self-assurance.

As an unusual kind of writer who rejoiced at being seen, and whose archive therefore abounds with not only numerous novels, diaries, essays, memoirs, and magazine columns, but also with ceaseless images of herself and her family, Clift’s life feels as if it were invented for the screen. As Life Burns High attests, this was the case even before Clift and Johnston settled to raise their children on Hydra, the sun-bleached Greek Island on which they were at the centre of a lively artistic community, including notables such as Leonard Cohen and Sidney Nolan.

Director-writer-producer Rachel Lane had the same impression of Clift’s cinematic fate as soon as she finished reading Wheatley’s biography: “I’m always fascinated by women who break out of the norm - I was immediately captivated by her courage, her bravery in living what would’ve been considered quite an unorthodox life, at the time. Charmian’s story has all the hallmarks of a feature film where life imitates art. She was just stunning, and she led this creative life, with the bohemian life on Hydra, her creative relationship with George (even though it was obviously tumultuous at times) and then this amazing writing career.

Returning to Sydney with three young children, Charmian found success writing a newspaper column, but George’s ill health and a new novel rumoured to be critical of his wife, fractured their creative partnership, and tragedy ensued with her early death at age of 45.

Interest in Charmian’s work has revived with the recent publication of her unfinished novel The End of Morning. Tasmanian writer Inigo Bailey concisely summarised her life and career:

Charmian Clift was one of the finest writers Australia has produced. Hundreds of thousands of readers eagerly anticipated her weekly Sydney Morning Herald essays in the 1960s. Her life imitated art with all the hallmarks of a compelling novel. She had movie star looks, a brilliant writing career and a passionate, creative marriage. Yet the sacrifice of security for the bohemian romance of life on a Greek island with its famous friends, parties, drinking, love affairs and poverty, led to her death by suicide at forty-six.

There is a revival of interest in Clift and her writing because of her clear vision on so many issues which still trouble Australia. There is a desire to see her step out of the shadow of her husband George Johnston. As Nadia Wheatley said: “In every generation there are certain writers who function as national weathervanes, recording change in the social and political climate. Charmian Clift was one of those”.

Life Burns High skilfully tells the story through Charmian’s essays, interviews, archive images, archive sound recordings and archive footage and live action. It also includes excerpts from Charmian’s brilliant and prescient essays written from 1964-1969, a thousand words every week, for the Sydney Morning Herald. Overall, Life Burns High made for a memorable night at an old-style West Island movie palace.