Charmian Clift, ‘radicalising force’ for feminism, finally gets to shine

Director Rachel Lane was stumped. After six frustrating years trying to make a film about the brilliant Australian writer Charmian Clift, with no interest from government agencies and broadcasters, how could she get it made?

The solution: take out a newspaper ad.

Charmian Clift in Rachel Lane’s documentary Charmian Clift: Life Burns High.Credit: Sydney Film Festival

“Charmian Clift was one of the greatest Australian writers of the 20th century,” the ad in The Sydney Morning Herald read. “Her weekly newspaper column was a radicalising force for feminism and multiculturalism, and her Greek travel memoirs kicked off a genre. We need your help to raise production funds to tell her story.”

Such is the enduring popularity of Clift that more than 230 contributors helped Lane shoot the documentary Charmian Clift: Life Burns High.

Now it is having a world premiere at 71st Sydney Film Festival, which opens with another new Australian documentary, Paul Clarke’s Midnight Oil: The Hardest Line, at the State Theatre on Wednesday night.

Films from around the world, everywhere from Algeria to Vietnam, will screen in 10 cinemas over 12 days.

Lane is delighted Charmian Clift is among them.

“The blood, sweat and tears that I have quite willingly put in over the years have been validated,” she says.

The documentary follows Clift from her adventurous childhood in Kiama on the NSW South Coast to her World War II career writing and editing an army magazine, then her scandalous relationship with George Johnston, a famous war correspondent who was more than a decade older and married with a child.

It recounts their bohemian life together in an artistic community on the Greek island of Hydra, raising three children. Then, back in Australia, the success of Clift’s trailblazing newspaper columns as Johnston triumphed with the semi-autobiographical novel My Brother Jack, and her shock suicide at 45.

It shows Clift as a glamorous rebel – an unrecognised collaborator on My Brother Jack – who lived up to her declaration “let us live with all our candles blazing”.

Marta Dusseldorp reads excerpts from Clift’s wonderfully evocative writing that show her fierce intelligence, wit and spirited progressive views about such issues as the changing role of women, the importance of Indigenous recognition, and the folly of Australia’s involvement in the Vietnam War.

Based on Nadia Wheatley’s acclaimed 2001 biography The Life and Myth of Charmian Clift, the documentary adds to a growing body of creative work about her.

“I instantly fell in love with Charmian and this wonderful, courageous heart that she had”: director Rachel Lane.Credit: Flavio Brancaleone

It includes English writer Polly Samson’s 2020 Hydra-inspired novel A Theatre for Dreamers, about a young woman who goes to live in the artistic community that includes Clift, Johnson and a young Leonard Cohen on Hydra; the republication of Clift’s travel books Mermaid Singing and Peel Me A Lotus in 2021; and the publication of Sneaky Little Revolutions, a selection of Clift’s essays edited by Wheatley, in 2022.

This year has seen the publication of Clift’s unfinished novel The End of the Morning, also edited by Wheatley. Still to screen is the Norwegian-Canadian TV series So Long, Marianne, about Cohen’s romance with muse Marianne Ihlen in Hydra, with Anna Torv as Clift and Noah Taylor as Johnston.

So why all the renewed interest in Clift?

“I don’t think there’s ever not been interest,” the documentary’s producer, Sue Milliken, says. Her work includes the 2001 miniseries My Brother Jack, which starred Claudia Karvan and Matt Day as the fictionalised versions of Clift and Johnston in the novel.

The ad in The Sydney Morning Herald that helped find backers for Rachel Lane’s documentary Charmian Clift: Life Burns High.

Adds Lane: “It’s always about Charmian. It’s never about George. Even though he was hailed as having the writer’s career when they were alive, everybody’s more interested in Charmian as a character.”

Milliken was a young script assistant on an ABC documentary about artist Sidney Nolan that Clift and Johnston, who were friends of his, worked on in 1968.

“I really liked them a lot,” Milliken says. “She was all the things that everybody says, charismatic, smart and warm, and he was utterly charming.”

Lane says that when she proposed the project, Milliken was immediately interested: “Sue responded in about five minutes flat in an email. She said, ‘I keep telling myself I’m retired but how can I say no to such a project.’ ”

Charmian Clift with George Johnston and Kalymnian woman Sevasti Taktikou in 1963.Credit: Fairfax

Milliken thinks there is a tragic cast to Clift’s story that contributes to the interest, especially when her suicide was followed by Johnston’s death from tuberculosis a year later, then two of their children dying young, daughter Shane in 1974 and son Martin in 1990.

The couple’s only surviving child, Jason Johnston, allowed the filmmakers access to the family archive of films and photographs but did not want to be interviewed.

After getting the rights to the biography a decade ago, Lane tried to adapt it for a feature film but could never get it financed.

“Reading the biography, it just took me to this amazing place and I instantly fell in love with Charmian and this wonderful, courageous heart that she had,” she says. “I thought, wow, this woman was way ahead of her time.”

When they switched to making a documentary, it also proved to be surprisingly challenging to make.

“From a government or a finance point of view, we’re the only ones who could really see the value in the story,” Milliken says.

Lane has high hopes for the festival screening and later telecast on Foxtel.

“She says in the beginning of our film, ‘I wanted to be a film star. I didn’t think so much of being an actor, I wanted to be a film star,’ ” Lane says. “Here’s your moment Charmian. Go shine. You get to be a film star.”

The Sydney Film Festival runs from June 5 to 16.

Lifeline 131 114

Find out the next TV, streaming series and movies to add to your must-sees. Get The Watchlist delivered every Thursday.