Obituary: Rose Creswell, a selfless promoter of local writers

Remembering a woman who helped shape the brilliant careers of now-famous Australian authors.

Rose Creswell left school without matriculating but ended up graduating from university.

Obituary: Rosemary (Rose) Creswell, OAM

June 28, 1941-April 19, 2017

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She should have died hereafter;

There would have been a time for such a word.

… Out, out, brief candle!

Lady Macbeth may have exited her tale of “sound and fury” decades younger than did Rosemary Creswell, but Rose’s candle burned no less lamentably briefly. It did burn, however, with a fierce illuminative power that shed light on and for those who knew her, profited from her selfless labours, loved her.

Rose was awarded her OAM in 2008 “for service to literature, particularly through the promotion and support of Australian writers”. As journalist Samantha Trenoweth observed: “She transformed the literary landscape.”

Yet in 2005 she was diagnosed with Benson’s syndrome, a form of Alzheimer’s disease. She spent the final six years of her life in a nursing home in the NSW Blue Mountains in a state medically described as “unresponsive wakefulness”, a cruelly ironic fate for one who for more than 60 years had been so responsive to the needs of others. She died on April 19, aged 75.

Frank Moorhouse notes that in her sophomore days in the heady world of the Friday front bar at Jim Buckley’s Newcastle Hotel near Sydney’s Circular Quay, she was already a master of irony. He also observes: “Her last years are the greatest tragedy of my life.” As they must be for writer Roger Milliss, her partner of more than 30 years, who visited her bedside every day.

Her determination and dedication to the task in hand cannot be sufficiently admired. She left school without matriculating, “too busy being a bad girl and learning how to smoke”, as she later claimed, worked for some time as a copywriter at radio station 2SM and attended classes at the WEA in Margaret Street — just around the corner from the Newcastle — under the aegis of Sydney University’s department of adult education.

She was encouraged by her teachers, particularly Donovan Clarke (literature) and Owen Harries (politics), to apply for a mature-age bursary to the University of Sydney. It was awarded her on the proviso that she sit first-year English to show she could complete a university-level course. She did, and came top (out of about 800, at a wild surmise). She was admitted to an arts degree but was told by inflexible university boffins that her unmatriculated year would not count and she would have to repeat.

She knuckled down, saying with a laugh that the pleasure of great books was in the re-reading. This time she came fifth, but this may be, in the unlikely possibility that memory serves correctly, because Ivor Indyk and John Tranter had joined the ranks that year. She graduated with first-class honours and the University Medal, her dissertation being on English novelist Malcolm Lowry, a man as famous for his alcoholism as for his writings. She loved to quote him: “How, unless you drink as I do, could you hope to understand the beauty of an old Indian woman playing dominoes with a chicken?”

A version of her work on Lowry is published in Cunning Exiles (Angus & Robertson, 1974), which boasts myself and Stephen Knight as editors but of which Rose was truly the “onlie begetter”, persuading Richard Walsh at A&R to publish it, and perhaps rehearsing her career as literary agent. Indeed, the ever-droll Professor Knight, under the influence of Roman Polanski’s film, suggested the book be called “Rosemary’s Baby”.

This unmatriculated girl went on to complete a doctorate in late 16th-century literature, particularly playwright Christopher Marlowe, publishing a redaction, “Doctor Faustus and the Renaissance World”, in the first volume of Sydney Studies in English. While Rose dealt with the development of scientific thought in Marlowe’s time, one cannot help observing that he died aged 29 in a tavern dagger fight. He would have fitted in fine at the Newcastle, a “brawler, a heretic, a magician, a duellist, a tobacco-user, carouser, and a rakehell”.

Putting the excitements and excesses of scholarship behind for the palmier days of literary agency, Rose in 1979 established the first independent Australian literary agency, which she dissuaded her friends calling “Rosemary Lunchwell and Associates” because it was “bad for business”. Perhaps she was joking, for we had “heard the chimes at midnight, Master Shallow”. Moorhouse claims to have been her first client and the most trouble.

Rose helped shape the brilliant careers of countless writers, including Blanche d’Alpuget, Jean Bedford, Edmund Campion, Peter Corris, Bob Ellis, David Foster, Richard Victor (“Dick”) Hall, who delivered his manuscripts and his laundry in a cardboard box, Donald Horne, Jenny Kee, Drusilla Modjeska, Cindy Pan, Nadia Wheatley … What do you call such a collection of clients? A handful.

We began with one Shakespearean tragedy. Let us end with another.

There’s rosemary, that’s for remembrance.

Pray, love, remember.

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Don Anderson taught literature at the University of Sydney for 30 years.