The End of the Morning

By Nadia Wheatley and Charmian Clift

The never-before-published novel by Charmian Clift. In those days the end of the morning was always marked by the quarry whistle blowing the noon knock-off.Since everybody was out of bed very early, morning then was a long time, or even, if you came to think about it, a round time — symmetrical anyway, and contained under a thin, radiant, dome shaped cover... ' During the years of the Great Depression, Cressida Morley and her eccentric family live in a weatherboard cottage on the edge of a wild beach. Outsiders in their small working-class community, they rant and argue and read books and play music and never feel themselves to be poor. Yet as Cressida moves beyond childhood, she starts to outgrow the place that once seemed the centre of the world. As she plans her escape, the only question is: who will she become?The End of the Morning is the final and unfinished autobiographical novel by Charmian Clift. Published here for the first time, it is the book that Clift herself regarded as her most significant work. Although the author did not live to complete it, the typescript left among her papers was fully revised and stands alone as a novella. It is published here alongside a new selection of Clift' s essays and an afterword from her biographer Nadia Wheatley. The End of the Morning is full of feeling, animated by that formless, aching questioning of childhood, and a fascinating glimpse of the forces that shaped Clift as a person and a writer.' — Fiona Wright Reading her, even a glimpsed paragraph of her, is like quaffing the finest champagne on earth.' — Peter Craven, Sydney Morning Herald Forthright, funny and with an indefinable flair, Charmian Clift' s writing plays second fiddle to nobody.' — Richard Cotter, Sydney Arts Guide

• Language: English
• Publisher: NewSouth
• Release date: Apr 1, 2024
• ISBN: 9781742238920

Charmian Clift

Charmian Clift was born in Kiama, New South Wales, in 1923. She became a journalist on the Melbourne Argus newspaper after the war, and in 1947 married novelist and journalist George Johnston. Early in their marriage they collaborated on three novels, then, in 1954, they took their family to live in the Greek Islands. There, Clift wrote these accounts of her life and two novels, Honour’s Mimic and Walk to the Paradise Gardens. On returning to Australia in 1964, Clift began writing a weekly newspaper column which quickly gained a wide and devoted readership. She died in 1969.

Book preview

Cover image for The End of the Morning, by Charmian Clift

the end of the morning

CHARMIAN CLIFT was born in 1923 in Kiama, on the New South Wales south coast. Describing herself as coming from a family of ‘liars and embroiderers’, from an early age she began transforming her home and childhood into fiction.

After serving as a lieutenant in the Australian Army, in 1946 Clift joined the staff of Melbourne’s Argus newspaper, where she met fellow journalist George Johnston. Over the next twenty-three years, the couple raised three children, produced thirty books, and created a legend.

While living in Greece, Clift wrote the travel memoirs Mermaid Singing and Peel Me a Lotus, and the novels Walk to the Paradise Gardens and Honour’s Mimic. She also began the autobiographical novel titled The End of the Morning, which she regarded as her major work.

Returning to Australia in 1964, Charmian Clift set her novel aside so that she could devote her time to her weekly newspaper column and to her family commitments. Although she resumed work on The End of the Morning in 1968, she died a year later, before the book was completed.

For more information, see: www.charmianclift.com.au

NADIA WHEATLEY is the editor of Sneaky Little Revolutions: Selected Essays of Charmian Clift and the author of The Life and Myth of Charmian Clift. Described by critic Peter Craven as ‘one of the greatest Australian biographies’, this was acclaimed as the Age Non- Fiction Book of the Year, 2001, and was awarded the NSW Premier’s Australian History Prize in 2002. It remains the classic account of the life and work of this transformational Australian writer.

For more information, see: www.nadiawheatley.com

Also by Charmian Clift

Novels

High Valley (with George Johnston), 1949

The Big Chariot (with Johnston), 1953

The Sponge Divers (with Johnston), 1955

Walk to the Paradise Gardens, 1960

Honour’s Mimic, 1964

Memoirs

Mermaid Singing, 1956

Peel Me a Lotus, 1959

Essay collections

Images in Aspic, 1965, ed. George Johnston

The World of Charmian Clift, 1970, ed. George Johnston

Trouble in Lotus Land, 1990, ed. Nadia Wheatley

Being Alone with Oneself, 1991, ed. Nadia Wheatley

Sneaky Little Revolutions: Selected Essays of Charmian Clift, 2022, first published under the title Charmian Clift: Selected Essays in 2001 by HarperCollins Australia, ed. Nadia Wheatley

the end of the morning

The never-before-published novel by

Charmian Clift

edited by Nadia Wheatley

Logo: NewSouth Publishing.

UNSW Press acknowledges the Bedegal people, the Traditional Owners of the unceded territory on which the Randwick and Kensington campuses of UNSW are situated, and recognises their continuing connection to Country and culture. We pay our respects to Bedegal Elders past and present.

A NewSouth book

Published by

NewSouth Publishing

University of New South Wales Press Ltd

University of New South Wales

Sydney NSW 2052

AUSTRALIA

https://unsw.press/

© in The End of the Morning and essays: Estate of Charmian Clift 2024

© in the selection, afterword and notes: Nadia Wheatley 2024

This book is copyright. Apart from any fair dealing for the purpose of private study, research, criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright Act, no part of this book may be reproduced by any process without written permission. Inquiries should be addressed to the publisher.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the National Library of Australia

Internal design Josephine Pajor-Markus

Cover design Alissa Dinallo

Cover image Ken Searle, Bombo Headland, oil on wood, 2018

All reasonable efforts were taken to obtain permission to use copyright material reproduced in this book, but in some cases copyright could not be traced. The editor welcomes information in this regard.

contents

the end of the morning

editor’s note

the end of the morning

afterword

selected essays

editor’s note

the cadences of the bush

on a cluttered mantelpiece

the day of the wombat

what price rubies?

time, progress, and Christmas holidays

an old address book

the pleasure of leisure

a Rembrandt in the kitchen

on being a private ham

the voice of the people

on junior thespians

action or activities?

we three kings of Orient aren’t

soldiering on

on Little Noddy, Christopher Robin, Gargantua, Don Quixote, and all that lot

on not seeing America Hurrah

a sense of property

on England, my England

preserver with a book

the joy of a good old cuppa

Babylon versus the corner store

pilgrimage to a possibility

on getting your name in the paper

democracy laid low

on being a kangaroo

the last days of Prometheus

goodbye, Mr Chips

box about, boys!

outside the fence

requiem for a spinster

publication dates

notes

the end of the morning

editor’s note

Over the course of her life, Charmian Clift worked on an autobiographical novel set in the small south coast quarry settlement where she had grown up, and featuring a fictional family derived from her own. A version of this work-in-progress, written in 1962 and titled The End of the Morning, was narrated by an alter ego named Cressida Morley. Initially set aside so the author could support her husband, George Johnston, in the writing of his masterpiece My Brother Jack, this work would remain in the ‘bottom drawer’ until she returned to it towards the end of 1968.

In early 1969, Clift gave to her friend June Crooke a typescript of the recently-revised version of the manuscript. Apart from some changes to the names of places and people, and a few pages of new draft material, this was identical to the 1962 version. Although the novel was not finished when Clift died in July 1969, this section of the novel was fully revised and complete in itself. Dealing with the childhood of Cressida Morley, it stands alone as a novella.

Both sets of typescripts are in the National Library of Australia. The draft pages in the 1969 script have been omitted from this published version, and names have been made consistent between the two versions, but in every other way The End of the Morning is as Charmian Clift herself revised it.

the end of the morning

In those days the end of the morning was always marked by the quarry whistle blowing the noon knock-off.

Since everybody was out of bed very early, morning then was a long time, or even, if you came to think about it, a round time – symmetrical anyway, and contained under a thin, radiant, dome shaped cover that was perhaps the celestial pattern for all the dome shaped covers which in those days still preserved such sentimental mementos as bridal wreaths, cake decorations from weddings and christenings, funeral ribbons, army biscuits carved with camels, sphinxes modelled from matchsticks, golden keys presented at twenty-firsts, babies’ shoes, and small bullet-dented bibles that had been worn over soldiers’ hearts.

We Morleys, having neither wreath, ribbon, nor army biscuit (my mother, Grace Morley, had been married sensibly in a coat and skirt; my father, Tom Morley, had curtly refused to go and fight for bloody England; not one of us three children had been christened; and the thought of death in connection with any of us was absurd), laughed contemptuously at the dusty relics that other people preserved. We were an arrogant lot and all inclined by temperament to prefer celestial domes anyway.

The morning dome was a beautiful one, pure and of a size adequate to encompass the far blue bulk of Jamberoo and Saddleback; a hundred or so of round hills fuzzed grey with lantana and white with sweet Alice, patchily plotted with farmers’ fields, and crowned with majestic umbrellas of Moreton Bay fig; a crumbling purple cliff; a casual mile-long sweep of salmon sand; the noble headland that had been riven and blasted through the years by pick, dynamite and drill into the likeness of a disabled battle cruiser still plowing gallantly on into the sea; and even the sea itself – so vast, so silky dark, so brilliantly glittering, advancing unhurriedly in measured ranks of terrible power that curled out slow white banners as they neared the beach.

The sound of the sea filled the mornings. It was like living inside a shell. The soothing monotonous surf music beat and beat back from the hills, crump and swoosh, crump and swoosh, over and over and over. How many decibels? My father would have known.

Weeding through the vegetable rows in the backyard, flustering inefficiently with the clotheslines, or hurrying out the front gate with my father’s crib tin, my mother had at times been overheard to murmur hypnotically to herself: ‘Roll on thou deep and dark blue Ooocean … Rooooolllllll!’

Morning was a time when you could even resort to poetry. When, sometimes, indeed, as she had said quite wildly on occasion to one or other of us children, you were driven to it.

When the quarry whistle blew the morning was smashed to smithereens. No sound so vengeful could have been heard on earth before. Excepting perhaps at Jericho. We young Morleys grew up in the firm conviction that Joshua, at least, had been accurately reported. Farmers’ wives as far afield as Jamberoo, Minnamurra, and Gerringong set their kitchen clocks by that dreadful blast of sound.

It usually caught my mother on her way home after delivering the crib tin. She would crouch inside the cemetery gate (where she invariably dodged to avoid Bannan’s herd of hated cows jostling in from the highway to their afternoon paddock), with her hands pressed tightly over both her ears, her untidy silver head bent, and her small face screwed tight in anguished expectancy. For every day, on the full vindictive horror of the whistle’s shriek, came the shattering roar of old Bunger Bradley’s detonators wreaking destruction among the soaring blue shafts of basalt on the headland. An operation referred to mildly by the men as ‘letting the pops off’.

And then, where the railway trestle ruled a high bank against aloes, dunes and marram grass, the tunnel in the hill belched fumes like a dragon’s mouth and out shot the Daylight Flyer, hooting and clattering over the bridge and along by the beach on its way to Sydney. Through the rose and silver shimmer where the quarry cottages clustered by the creek even the highway seemed suddenly to leap forward, forward in a wide, slate blue sweep, leaving in its wake a debris of white picket fences and portulaca borders.

Over the hill from Lebanon Bay we children came trotting from school, hungry for our lunches.

After that it was afternoon.

***

The centre of the world was the last house of five identical wooden cottages at the bottom of the hill, just before the new concrete bridge that spanned the creek.

It was the last house of the town in fact, because on the other side of the bridge you were in a different municipality, and there was no other settlement until you came to the small village of Bombo, a mile or so away over the hills – unless you counted the white settlement of the dead in which my mother gratefully took refuge from Bannan’s cows, and at which she looked with loathing from the security of her kitchen window.

The creek looped around the five cottages, separated from their front picket fences by the width of the highway, then trickled through the tall striding silvery legs of the railway bridge and spread out on the beach beyond in a wide brackish bowl which we children dignified with the name of lagoon; all of us had had to learn to swim in it first, before our father permitted us the lovely dangerous pleasures of the surf.

The house was permeated by the smell of this creek, a richly rotten smell of hot mud and decaying seaweed which my father belligerently contended would be worth a quid a whiff if some quack could only patent it, and invaded by drifts of fine yellow sand. Only the retaining wall of the railway embankment kept the beach in its place, you felt. But for that the sand would long ago have reclaimed highway, creek and houses too. You could never forget how close the sea was. Once, after a heavy storm, there had been seaweed draped on the front fence in the morning.

My mother had done what she could with the front of the house, screening the verandah with a jungle of plants: there were asparagus ferns, fat hydrangea bushes with huge heads the colours of litmus paper, climbing geraniums of red and pink and white, sweet peas in season and a marvellous fuchsia bush hung with brilliant satiny bells. But nothing could disguise the shabbiness of the cottage, nor really distinguish it materially from its neighbours. It remained a square wooden box, bisected laterally by a narrow hall, and vertically by thin weatherboard walls which divided it into four compartments of equal size. There was a small room tacked on behind to serve for a kitchen, a tin shed for washing, and up at the end of the yard a high narrow dunny which discreetly faced the paling fence and was partly hidden by sunflowers or staked dahlias according to the season.

Apart from this terrace of quarry cottages there was not more than a score or so of houses at this end of the town, all variations on the same architectural butter box theme, their faded corrugated iron roofs straggling down beside the plunging swoop of the gunmetal highway.

It was obviously the end, rather than the beginning of somewhere.

Lebanon Bay proper lay over the hump of Pheasant Point and through The Cutting. It was a pretty place of solid brick bungalows and older, more graceful houses of stone or wood with wide verandahs held by slim cedar posts, set down in pleasant gardens on vertiginous hills and laced together about two wide shopping streets and a small hoop of harbour with the dark stiff serried verticals of Norfolk pines. The pines laid feathers of shadow over the streets and at night they rustled scratchily in the wind.

It was common family knowledge that my mother still nursed an ambition for us to live in the town, although nobody, in fact, had heard her say so aloud in years, and nobody ever thought for a minute that it was likely to happen. Bunger Bradley couldn’t have blasted out my father with the midday pops.

And anyway, as he had once pointed out to my mother, she would have a walk of two full miles with his crib tin every day if we moved into Lebanon Bay.

From this remark we children, young as we were at the time, understood quite distinctly that our father was buggered if he was going to walk two miles to work every day.

It was significant that not then, nor at any other time, did it occur to anybody that my mother might save herself the walk with the crib tin by the simple expedient of giving it to my father to take himself when he set out in the mornings.

That crib tin, with its hot shepherd’s pie or cauliflower cheese, its small glass jars of salad and cold butter and creamy rice pudding, packed according to ritual, covered with a napkin, and delivered by hand at precisely fifteen minutes to twelve at the machine shop on the headland, was subtle evidence not only of her refusal to give in – like putting flowers on the table, not eating in the kitchen, having ‘dinner’ instead of ‘tea’, and patiently continuing to correct our table manners and our accents – but also of an ideal of wifely service to which she stubbornly adhered as part of the matrimonial bargain.

The crib tin was taken for granted, but my father would have been deeply hurt and humiliated if she had ever failed him with it, as deeply humiliated as if she had nagged or upbraided him publicly in the normal manner of quarry wives. But she never did fail, and she never did nag, publicly or privately either. At whatever age she was in those days (we did not know: she was as evasive of the question as a beauty), her small broad face, sagging with tiredness and neglect, seamed with worry lines, and showing on those heroic cheekbones curious dark indentations like bruises or the stains of tears, was settling into the mould of her dominant race strain: in relaxation her expression of dignity, patience and resignation revealed her Jewish heritage.

A kindly ageing little woman you would think, noticing the dignity and strength of the crumpled face, the premature silver of the wispy hair, and perhaps missing the entirely youthful recklessness of the ardent golden eyes. A woman who would lie uncomplainingly on the bed she had made, mind her own business, and keep her own council. For the moment she kept her own dreams also, dreams of quite reckless immoderation that centred not upon herself but on us children, or, more accurately, on the eldest of us, Cordelia, who was thirteen and would be a beauty.

‘There are more ways of killing a cat than by choking it with butter,’ she had sometimes muttered in the mornings too as she hurried out the gate with the crib tin. Poetry didn’t always answer.

***

On Saturday mornings and in school holidays the crib tin was delegated to us children; whichever of us delivered it to the machine shop was allowed to blow the knock-off whistle.

We two young ones, Ben and Cress, took turns. Cordelia was exempt from this, as from all other duties, and spent holiday mornings sitting on the front verandah with her thick sketch book and box of Winsor and Newton’s water colours, painting romantic pictures of a young girl with long brown hair, long oval face, blue oval eyes and pale proud timid mouth, disguised variously as a maiden being rescued from a dragon, a cowgirl blazing away from a galloping horse at pursuing Indians, a shepherdess in a paved garden rioting with roses and hollyhocks, or Cordelia the landlord’s daughter plaiting a dark red love-knot into her long brown hair. The accompanying gallant in the shepherdess picture, the knight slaying the dragon, the sheriff thundering across the plain to the rescue of the cowgirl, the highwayman reined in beneath the casement where Bess-Cordelia plaited her ribbon, all had the thin nose, black curls and melting dark eyes of young Sel Drummond who served in his father’s milk bar in the town. The paintings were considered remarkable by everyone who saw them, and formed the basis on which my mother’s dreams proliferated (and in which, significantly, young Sel Drummond played no part).

The very intensity of my mother’s dreams invested Cordelia with a mysterious quality of apartness. Of preparation. To us younger children she was often wholly strange, an unknowable being stepping pridefully beyond us into something shining, marvellous, and as yet undeclared: had the Prince of Wales pulled up at the picket fence in a golden coach with a crown on his head and one in his hand