Charmian Clift: What Migrants Miss Most in Australia

From the newspaper article, "On Gathering No Moss", included (undated) in "The World of Charmian Clift", 1970 - essays from the last two years of Charmian Clift's writings for the Melbourne Herald and the Sydney Morning Herald. She had begun writing a weekly column for the Sydney Morning Herald after fourteen years living abroad.

It must have been published several years before she took her own life, almost fifty years ago, on 8th July, 1969.

Charmian writes that migrants to Australia might have been "a good deal better off emotionally in their own familiar social patterns, which are generally richer and more colourful and more satisfying than anything we can provide".

By the time I lived in Australia, the country had changed in many ways: the Mediterranean spirit had established itself down under, even if the siesta was no longer a practical possibility for most people.

As she points out, life wasn't much fun "in a crowded slum in the inner suburbs or a still unsewered estate twenty miles out, certainly way beyond range of all those lovely golden beaches".

Remember, she was writing about the situation as she found it more than fifty years ago.

She wasn't always happy living on the Greek island of Hydra. Her article, "Getting Away From it All" expresses her dissatisfaction with the number of visitors expecting her to be "entirely at their disposal", a "permanent summer host" to all-comers, including the friends of friends of friends. "Hydra during the years I lived on it appeared to be the holiday goal of half the world...the one thing certain about holiday-makers is their inability to accept, or even comprehend, that everybody else is not on holiday too".

She also complains of those visitors arriving on steamers (cruise-ships these days), who never spend more than a day, or maybe just a few hours "to wring the island dry of its history, economy, local customs and quaint folklore, to snap the colour slides, buzz off a few feet of film, raid the tourist shops, write the postcards and be off".

Charmian Clift, Self Portrait: - Ten years on Hydra

“We were about the first foreigners who lived on that island, and later…others came drifting in, buying houses, and there began to be established a foreign colony – I don’t like that word “colony” very much but I can’t think of anything else to call it - a foreign colony composed of people who  wanted to write and people who wanted to paint, and exiles from all over the world…I began to feel like an exile myself. I hadn’t until that point, because in spite of the fact that one was alien again, on that island for the first time I didn’t feel like an outsider looking in, because I had built something for myself that was mine…the foreign colony got more and more fashionable…and our cheap little island that was ours was ours no longer”. Self Portraits by Charmian Clift, selected by David Foster, 1991

"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. While her writing was so far ahead of her time that her opinions continue to challenge us to think about our identity and responsibilities as Australians, Clift’s cutting-edge social and political commentary was conveyed in a prose so exquisite that she is regarded as one of the greatest stylists of Australian literature"-  Nadia Wheatley, 

Nadia Wheatley on her biography of Charmian Clift (pdf)

- or read online


Q. Emigration and expatriation: what is the real difference? What do expatriates miss most?


See also:

Australians in Aspic: Picturing Charmian Clift and George Johnston’s Hydra Expatriation, TANYA DALZIELL, University of Western Australia, PAUL GENONI, Curtin University (pdf)


The World of Charmian Clift (Neglected Books)

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