5 minute read
Transgressive freedoms
Diamonds of sunlight
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by Bernadette Brennan
Review by Jenny Bird
After Bernadette Brennan finished her award-winning A Writing Life: Helen Garner and Her Work, she realised that she was ‘a bit hooked’ on archives and biography. She wanted to do it one more time. She chose to write a biography of the late Australian writer Gillian Mears, who died with dignity in 2016 after a long struggle with multiple sclerosis, aged fifty-one. Leaping Into Waterfalls: The Enigmatic Gillian Mears was published in 2021. Brennan has said of her reasoning for selecting Mears as a subject: ‘There’s a huge generation of great writers born in the 60s and early 70s who came after Helen Garner, Kate Grenville and Beverley Farmer. But their work is being left off print runs and they risk being forgotten. And I thought well, who was a really great writer from that time, and I started rereading Gillian Mears.’
Brennan, an academic, author and literary critic, found herself in front of a formidable archive. The Mears collection – 154 boxes in all – stretches along an extraordinary twenty-seven metres of shelving in the State Library of NSW. It is second only in size to the Fairfax family archive. Throughout her writing life Mears either donated or sold tranches of archival material to the Library, often in order to feed herself. A compulsive recorder of every detail of her life, Mears had her eye firmly on curating and preserving her own story. In her diaries (sometimes she wrote thirty pages a day) she would often directly address an imaginary biographer of the future. With Mears gone, Brennan added to the archive boxes sixty-five interviews with family, friends, lovers, fellow writers and publishers. Many were still grieving the loss of Gillian. Leaping Into Waterfalls is a literary portrait that focuses not only on Mears’ extensive body of writing and the arc of her stellar writing career, but on ‘the lived experience which produced it.’ Brennan quotes David Malouf: ‘Often the gap between the social person and the writing is great. In Gillian it was very close.’ Mears’s work is largely autobiographical fiction and the porous membrane between her life and her work offers Brennan both opportunities and challenges as a biographer. On the one hand she can tack seamlessly between the life and the work. On the other, Brennan confesses to sometimes getting confused – had she read that in a diary entry, a letter or a story? Does it matter? In the end aren’t all our lives curations to some degree? As a twenty-year-old writing student Mears’s tutors (the likes of Julianne Schultz, Drusilla Modjeska, and Steven Muecke) recognised her talent. In 1986 Bruce Pascoe (then editor of Australian Short Stories), published her first story ‘The Midnight Shift’. Pascoe begged her for more, and her first short story collection Ride a Cock Horse was published in 1988. She was twenty-four years old and never looked back. Publishers wanted her writing. Her output was prolific. Yet most of the time she lived a precarious existence on the edge of poverty. Mears wrote about Australia with an unflinching female gaze. She wrote about the underbelly of small country town life, the constraints on girls, power and gender and sexuality, death and disability, and the love and cruelty that subsist within families. For me,
in my thirties, reading The Mint Lawn and The Grass Sister in the nineties was revelatory. Then in 2011 came Foal’s Bread, which stands for many among the great Australian novels. Publishers fell over each other, with superlative feedback: ‘wondrous’, ‘magnificent’, ‘beautiful and astounding’, ‘breathtaking’. It won four major Australian literary awards. A side benefit of Leaping Into Waterfalls is that it also reads as a who’s who of the Australian writing and publishing world between the 1980s and 2015 (when Mears published her last book, the children’s fable The Cat with the Coloured Tale). Mears was not only a compulsive diarist but a compulsive letter writer, leaving a treasure chest of correspondence with other writers, editors, critics, judges of literary awards and publishers. Brennan notes that for Mears, letters were a ‘means of establishing herself in the Australian literary community’. Mears wrote letters to everyone, all the time, and forged friendships with the likes of Claire Arman, Gerald Murnane, Bruce Pascoe, Dorothy Porter, Helen Garner, David Malouf and others. Mears’s letters were also ‘a form of flirtation’, and she took her fair share of literary lovers. But the cruel inevitable march of Mears’ multiple sclerosis thrums through every chapter. Brennan offers us a portrait of an athletic woman who loved dancing and sex and bushwalking and transgressive freedoms. Mears’s heroic pursuit of life, love, sex and writing never abated, nor her brutally honest chronicling of her betraying body. We on the Northern Rivers of NSW can rightly claim Gillian Mears as one of our tribe. She lived in Goonellabah until she was nine, then in Grafton in the old ferryman’s house on the Clarence River. As an adult she moved away often but always returned to the Clarence Valley where her father and some sisters continued to live. She is buried beside her mother in the little bush cemetery at Copmanhurst, upriver from Grafton. Her last public event was at the Beach Cafe in Byron Bay where she launched The Cat with the Coloured Tale. It was November 2015, and Gillian sat in her wheelchair, backlit by diamonds of sunlight bouncing every which way off the water in the blue bay. She inhabited her wheelchair as if it were a throne. The MS had forced her limbs into uncomfortable angles and her voice was tremulous and reedy, like the high notes of a clarinet. When she spoke, her words were magical, tangential and surprising. With our grandchildren in mind, I bought two copies. Gillian signed them, her handwriting spidery and frail. She died six months later. If you already know the work of Gillian Mears then reading Leaping Into Waterfalls is a triple-layered delight. A biography written by a fine writer about a fine writer whose writing you love. If on the other hand you don’t know her work, then this biography serves, as Brennan intended, as a beautifully rendered reminder that we should keep reading her and give Mears her due as a great Australian writer.
Allen & Unwin / RRP $34.99 / 360pp
