Charmian Clift: Life Burns High | movie | 2024 | Official Trailer - video Dailymotion

Young Charmian left home for Sydney, met writer George Johnston in Melbourne. They moved to Hydra, befriending Leonard C | dG1fSnRMN0kzRjdQUjQ

Transcript

00:00My ambitions, as I said, were very large.

00:03I wanted to do something better than anyone else could do.

00:06Charmian definitely did what many of us would like to have done, but didn't dare.

00:11She was a troublemaker. She was a stirrer.

00:16She was innately an observer, a questioner, an activist.

00:22She took an axe to the ice and hard. She was going to smash it open.

00:27Most of all, she was a bloody good writer, a really good writer.

00:32She saw George Johnston. They both fall passionately in love.

00:38And so they decided in one fell swoop to move to Eithre.

00:43Those wonderful young, free people sitting in that circle.

00:48And you just want to be there.

00:51She wrote so exquisitely about what it was like to be a woman.

00:58Yes, that is how I feel.

01:02She was one of the first women's voices of a mother and a wife, but also a traveller.

01:08There was no other Australian writer writing quite that book.

01:13We know that George helped himself from her travel notebooks.

01:18And George had had a triumphant publication.

01:22It was as if Charmian was left behind.

01:26I should imagine that it was very hurtful.

01:30You could hear things breaking and plates being smashed and thinking,

01:33my God, one of them's going to kill the other.

01:35She had been worried about this thing.

01:37Completely unsuspecting of what it was that he was going to say.

01:41What this thing was, we shall never know.