Sneaky Little Revolutions
edited by Nadia Wheatley
Through the turbulent and transformative years of the 1960s, Charmian Clift engaged the readers of her weekly newspaper column in a way that would now be done by a blogger.
This new edition of Charmian Clift’s essays, is selected and introduced by her biographer, Nadia Wheatley. In these ‘sneaky little revolutions’, as Clift once called her ‘pieces’, she supported the rights of women and migrants, called for social justice for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people, opposed conscription and the war in Vietnam, acknowledged Australia’s role in the Asia-Pacific, fought censorship, called for a local film industry — and much more. In doing so, she set a new benchmark for the form of the essay in Australian literature.
“When I first stumbled on Clift’s essays, twenty or more years ago, these trashy essays written for a disposable occasion seemed to me to have more lightning and quicksilver, more brilliance and more skill of execution, than any Australian writing other than the great novels of Patrick White and Christina Stead.”
“Charmian Clift was ahead of her time and yet also representative of them. Her essays are a fascinating, thoughtful – sometimes judgemental, sometimes lyrical – window into an Australia on the brink of change. Whether you always agree with her opinions or not, she writes like a dream and her voice is wry, insightful and self-aware. It is lovely to see her gaining the recognition she has long deserved.”
“Reading these essays, it’s easy to see why Clift became a cult figure. The chatty, charming and sometimes slightly dippy persona distracts attention just enough from the steely intelligence, the sophisticated sentence structure and the passion for causes that characterize these pieces but might otherwise rather have alarmed her readers... In an era that hadn’t yet thought too much about these things, her columns demonstrated that a woman... could and should be an active citizen of the world.”