Gillian Mears and the Lost Art of Letter Writing

The shape of the past, I think, is like that of the hungry mosquito hanging in the near darkness by the thin gauze door: the closer I believe I am to reaching its outline, the more uncertain I become of its position.

Gillian Mears, Paradise Is a Place

‘I do love it, although there are procrastination techniques to stop you writing,’ Gillian Mears told me when I interviewed her in 1999. It was a throwaway comment but, twenty-seven years on, I regret not asking a follow-up question. Instead, in my inexperience, I simply pushed to the next point I’d carefully scripted in this long-ago interview.

It hints at a whole other conversation I could have, or should have, had. One that I’m wishing I could draw from now. Procrastination. From writing. While I write daily, to make my living, I’ve become expert at avoiding the writing that I really want and intend to do. Accidentally, I like to think, as the to-do list and chaos of everyday life intrudes, but also sometimes intentionally.

I started this essay at the kitchen table while the baby napped in 2016, the day after I read of Gillian’s death. My mother had called. ‘You should write something about when you met her,’ she said. So I tried. When her biographer contacted me in 2021, having discovered my original interview, it spurred me into a frenzy of regretful action again. Years later, when I asked a friend to read it for me after yet another round of edits, I joked that I’ll be writing this essay forever. The reality is, I’ve been writing this essay, in one way or another, since I met her: Why write?

—

In 1999 I had the luxury – known to those who spend too long at university – of floundering around in postcolonial and feminist theory while searching for a topic for my English Honours thesis. Tossing around names of Australian women writers, my supervisor, Sue Kossew, suggested I read Gillian Mears’s short story collection Fineflour. Named after the fictional town in which the stories are set, Fineflour offers a discontinuous narrative connected by the town’s river. I was immediately captivated by tales of girls finding their way in the world, the strangeness of quiet country towns and the nostalgia held within place and childhood. I’d never lived in a country town, but the descriptions of girlhood felt universal, and her observations of things usually left unsaid so true. The writing was beautiful and haunting. I fell in love with the sadness of the elderly sisters selling their dilapidated stuck-in-time house in ‘Afterthoughts’: ‘The river takes a lot of getting away from,’ Jibby murmurs. ‘As dear old Mumma used to tell us if it was in flood, the river won’t let some people go. It keeps hold…’ More weighty moments hung heavy in the air, like the headmaster in ‘Fineflour’ punishing Aboriginal kids by boarding them up in the roof of a toilet block on a hot day. And, like in her earlier collection Ride a Cock Horse, Fineflour was full of girls finding or losing themselves in awkward, unpleasant situations. Like Margot, in ‘Pipedream’: ‘The moment she was in his boat she felt regretful but by then the boat was already mid-river and moving away from the town… His fat fingers were appreciative of her smooth legs.’ Despite the poetic prose, the confronting rawness of some of the stories had caused enough shock in some circles to contribute to the book’s controversial removal from the HSC syllabus in 1997.

I read Gillian’s two novels next, The Mint Lawn and The Grass Sister, then hunted out her lesser-known stories on creaky library microfilms of obscure journals. I eventually planned for my thesis to focus on the novels, but as I read more of her short fiction and non-fiction, it was her writing about writing, and even observing how she wrote, which began to intrigue me. There were echoes of short stories within her novels, for instance. And I saw hints of her process in her essays and short non-fiction. ‘Sometimes it seems to me that my writing has been nothing more than a long in-memorium [sic] notice and always to the memory of childhood,’ she reflects in Paradise is a Place, her 1997 photo essay in collaboration with Sandy Edwards. And, in the radio essay ‘Five Feet High and Rising’, she says:

The effect of the water is like a kind of blessing to press on with whatever book or story I might be writing. If I find the courage to go for a long swim up river alone […] then I also discover the courage to go on writing my own particular kind of autobiographical fiction.

This tiny window into her writing preoccupied me, and, because I was harbouring aspirations to write myself, threw up so many questions. But, despite the awards and the accolades she had received for her work, Gillian was notoriously media-shy – at the time, she had given only a couple of published interviews. I couldn’t find the answers I was seeking in anything I’d read about her, and I started to wonder if interviewing her myself, to discover more about how she saw her own writing, could add something to my thesis.

By chance, my dad, who was a builder, happened to be renovating the home of the academic, Ivor Indyk. Ivor also ran a literary journal, HEAT, and had published some of Gillian’s stories. He passed on her address. Dad encouraged me to handwrite a letter asking for an interview, rather than type something more formal. I followed his advice, choosing pale-blue notepaper, then waited nervously, not really expecting a response. But a few weeks later Gillian replied by fax:

You are most welcome to come to Grafton to interview me, although as you may know, I am not very lucid when it comes to the spoken word. But I would do my best. It is a strange thought to think students have begun to write theses on my work as it doesn’t seem very long ago that I was a student.

We arranged a date: 10 September 1999. Gillian said she hoped the interview might help her hone her media skills; I was petrified, and overcompensated by compiling a lengthy list of questions. She gave accommodation suggestions and offered to send maps and lend me a tape recorder. When I confirmed the meeting arrangements, the day before I was due to take the ten-hour train ride from Sydney to Grafton, she wrote back: ‘Fear not, I have not forgotten. I look forward to talking not faxing!’

—

We met at the courtyard café in Grafton’s art gallery, and she instantly put me at ease with her warmth and enthusiasm. She looked exactly like her author photo. But there was no trace of her reputed shyness: she was talkative, funny and curious. The first thing she wanted to know was if I was a writer too? I admitted to some creative attempts. We ate vegetarian focaccia and discussed common ground: she was trying to be vegan, while I was on the cusp of becoming a vegetarian. She seemed to know everyone in the gallery, from the kitchen staff to the other diners.

After lunch, she took us past the shingled house she had lived in with her schoolteacher ex-husband and written about in The Mint Lawn. Then we drove back to a little wooden house on her family’s property out of town, full of dogs jumping about. She’d only recently moved there from the tent she had lived in for some years. She lit a fire. Quilts, photos and drawings covered the old furniture and decorated the walls; we drank tea while she answered my detailed questions patiently. At that point, I had lofty plans for my thesis: it was to cover a smorgasbord of critical ground, and toy with themes like coming-of-age, rewriting the traditional bildungsroman, madness and violence, sexuality, abjection, family, place, gender and gardens, as well as concepts like voyeurism, looking, subjectivity and life writing. But I could feel a rising tension that I wasn’t sure how to resolve between the academic and the practical: what I was analysing versus what I dreamed of writing myself. So, while I wasn’t yet sure where it would fit in, most of all I wanted to know about how, and why, Gillian wrote.

She showed me some of her notebooks, labelled and annotated, bulging with ideas, and described some of the ‘why’: ‘It’s a love of language rather than a love of narrative that makes me a writer and I often wonder “Why am I not a poet?” […] I have for a long time collected beautiful images or disturbing images or funny comments I overhear and it’s as if I know I’m collecting potential gold if I turn it into something else. […] I really just love that process, which is a bit jigsaw-like… I do it with all of my life, not just my writing. I like sewing squares together and I love making compost. It’s all quite a similar process of gathering things together and transforming them. […] It’s as if I can’t imagine that I would ever stop writing because I just seem unable to stop this collecting of things and writing them down. I think that’s the way that I find meaning within my life’s experiences.’

While we were talking, she took a copy of The Mint Lawn off the bookshelf in her writing room and discovered its pages were joined together by a large, grey, clay wasp’s nest, which she speculated would be full of larvae and dead spiders. It seemed like some kind of symbol, given she had said the book made her cringe.

‘I don’t dare look at it… it’s like looking back at a grungy old 1970s photo album of yourself,’ she said. Some years later, I read about a book with its pages bound by a wasp’s nest, cleverly woven into ‘Le Moustiquaire’, a short story in Mears’s collection A Map of the Gardens:

The insect came to the man’s book the last time they were at the coast; a mud wasp, seen by the boy as the man slept. He watched her from the beginning; the first painstaking layer of mud carried from the river in her mouth; her front legs smoothing it over the edge of the book. The boy had thought the wasp was the most diligent potter he’d ever encountered, forming up the wet foundation. […]

The man didn’t see the wasp’s work for nearly five days, by which time the pages of the book were already half sealed.

On that bright spring day in Grafton in 1999 we spoke about the blurry boundary between autobiography, biography and fiction in Gillian’s writing. ‘Writers put all these processes in place to pretend they’re not writing autobiographically… I think the most powerful writing comes from autobiographical elements.’ She acknowledged her stories were fed very deeply by her own life, and the life of her immediate family. ‘Yet I think it’s the little twists to absolute truth that somehow lights up a piece of fiction,’ she said.

She also spoke about weighing up her own creative need to collect and tell stories against the damage it may do to those around her, or what she called ‘the hideous underside of being a writer’: ‘Am I causing harm? I’m still working on that one.’

Gillian was thirty-five years old. I was twenty-four. By the time she was my age she’d already published the short story collection Ride a Cock Horse. Fineflour was on the way and she was just a couple of years from winning the Vogel. I was enjoying taking what even I knew was more time than necessary to finish university and face career reality, while working a variety of part-time jobs. By contrast, she seemed so unwaveringly certain and dedicated to her creative calling, despite its challenges. As we spoke, she described writing as being like archaeology, seeing a psychotherapist, or going deeper into a meditation. She talked tenderly about her writing routine and the importance of building in time for things to ferment or brew while she wrote letters or tended to horses. Writing was all-consuming, from the amount of time it took up to the variety of ways she wrote – making notes and writing letters were a break from writing books and stories. But she was also candid about the financial strain she was under, saying she had sold her childhood writing to the State Library and hoped not to have to get a part-time job, as it would delay her next book.

I asked her what inspired her and what had influenced her decision to become a writer. ‘The landscape in which I’ve grown – I would have to say that that’s probably the most profound influence of all,’ she said. Our conversation that afternoon circled around, covering characters, book titles, recurring motifs, plots and places. But it came back, again and again, to country towns, in confirmation of Gillian’s own suspicions about the origins of her work: ‘Country towns are like this bedrock of atmosphere,’ she said. ‘I may be writing a story set in Paris, Africa or India but up comes the past, which is linked always into country towns. But I think that this is what gives my writing power.’

Gillian spoke of other influences on her writing: her high school English teachers, including the one she married (and divorced); her writing teachers at UTS in the mid-1980s – Susan Hampton, Drusilla Modjeska and Stephen Muecke; and many women writers, from Carson McCullers, Marilynne Robinson and Marianne Wiggins to Helen Garner, Kate Grenville and Elizabeth Jolley. She described how, as an aspiring writer, she had sent one of her short stories to Elizabeth Jolley. To her delight Jolley had written back. ‘It really ignited me. I did want to be a writer, even though I felt I never would be one,’ she said.

I asked her about the importance of childhood and memory as another foundation to her work. ‘I just have this profound preoccupation with the past,’ she said. Her detailed observations about girlhood, and the struggle of her characters to find a voice, was one of the things that had drawn me into her writing and something that The Mint Lawn explores in detail:

‘Tell me something else about growing up,’ Thomas kept asking at Coal Stream Point. But I didn’t know what to say except how growing up in a country town organises your childhood and your life. And how unfair this is. That it traps you into peculiar patterns of passivity. That girls could only become involved in a limited number of interests: marching, sex, horses, Christian youth groups.

But when I told her I thought her books and stories had feminist concerns, she hesitated, initially saying that she’d taken most of the advances feminism had brought for granted. ‘The subterranean things going along underneath all my writing or a lot of my writing is very much looking at the terrible injustices meted out to girls and women. I mean I guess I do feel it very powerfully and feel it as a very real concern still, particularly in little towns with their pockets of terrible darkness.’ It was the ‘world of girls and sisters and mothers’ that, she said, drew something from her: ‘A desire […] to understand the choices that are made by women in country towns, which often seem to be the choices that take them into the arena of abjection and gloom and depression.’

We talked for many hours. And, as the light faded, she made me a copy, on shiny fax paper, of a recipe for sourdough bread. Then we got back into her dusty car, full of objects, papers, photos and a lot of nature, and she drove me back to town. There was a poem stuck on the dashboard about driving carefully and roadkill.

The next day I wandered the wide empty streets of Grafton. I found a second-hand copy of Marilyn French’s The Women’s Room in amongst the romance paperbacks at a bookshop. Then I jumped back on the train. Later, our conversation about vegetarianism rang in my ears as I ate what would end up being the last meat meal of my life: a late-night quarter pounder under the yellow lights of McDonald’s, the only place open on the final leg of the long journey home.

—

Months later, I posted her my finished thesis, some twenty thousand very earnest academic words that could probably be summed up by their title: ‘(Re-) Positioning the Gaze: The “subterranean” feminist themes within Gillian Mears’s novels, The Mint Lawn and The Grass Sister’. I included the thirty-page interview transcript as an appendix. The fact that The Mint Lawn made her cringe hadn’t deterred me, but I did wonder how she might feel reading my dissection of the themes in her writing.

When we’d met, we had discussed ‘The Figure in the Fig Tree’, an essay she’d written for Australia Day in 1996, with its powerful reflections on violence, as being one of her favourite pieces of her own work.

He is formed out of the roots of a sandpaper fig growing underneath the kamala. Only those who like to walk quietly and with faith into the dark clumps of rainforest trees left in paddocks would ever find their eyes meeting the bowed shape of his head. […] To walk to these trees never fails to give me the deep sense of peace and loneliness certain lines of poems can also bring.

A homemade card with a photo of the real-life ‘Figure in the Fig Tree’ arrived in mid-2000. To my relief, it was filled with gracious encouragement. ‘Thank you, genuinely, for sending me your thesis.’ Her black pen coloured in lumpy shapes to cover words she had decided to delete.

I had the eerie feeling that although my work has travelled quite far from the 2 novels you looked at, it has quite far still to journey. So in this way, your thesis arrived at a very good time – as I wonder what it is I continue to have to write. In even more subtle ways, reading your thesis was like reading a dream & has illuminated strange shadowy areas I am barely able to acknowledge… Good luck with publication attempts – it would of course also be of benefit to me and my work.

A piece of folded lilac letterhead, printed with her new address and an extra note, was folded inside the card: ‘I hope you are finding time to make bread.’

Later that year I landed my dream job in book publishing, and Gillian and I exchanged intermittent letters. Her distinctive spidery writing and homemade cards with drawings and clippings always brightened my mailbox when most people had resorted to email. When I wrote to tell her, in 2002, that the thesis interview would finally be published in two parts, in Meanjin and Antipodes, she worried that the conversation should have a date attached. ‘I rather fear I am no longer that person you spoke to two years ago,’ she said, adding that the story she had picked as her favourite was no longer one she liked.

In her letters, she wondered about letting old books go out of print or stay alive, cheekily asked for free books that I’d sneak into the post from work, worried about income and encouraged me. ‘Blessings to your writing pen,’ she signed off a card made from a photo of a sunflower in her vegetable patch, writing across, instead of along, the lines on the back of the file card she’d glued it to. She was generous, too, as I studied post-grad writing at UTS, joined a writing group and attempted to find my voice by writing essays and stories: ‘So glad to hear your own writing is bringing you pleasure. Surely the most important aspect of all, yet all too often people forget this.’ She was right, I certainly felt that pleasure beneath the hard labour of writing. Its addictive nature continued to draw me in; carving out enough time for it was the obstacle.

She also wrote of her difficulties walking, some time before the clarity of her MS diagnosis: ‘You ask after my health […] I never imagined I’d become disabled before turning 40. It is my own great sorrow and mystery.’ Around this time, A Map of the Gardens was published. On the back of a postcard depicting boxes of spices, she said her ‘correspondence tin’ would be shutting as she made time to work on drafts of Foal’s Bread. But those plans were waylaid. In mid-2002, Gillian was hospitalised in Sydney with life-threatening endocarditis requiring open-heart surgery. Sick for many weeks, she wrote to me about her long, slow recovery, thanking me for supplies she’d asked me to drop at the hospital. In another letter she enquired, ‘I wonder how your writing is going and if it’s pleasing you? And also if the [publishing] work is still good?’ She wondered how it was possible to combine writing with other employment, telling me in her letters of her own struggle to find time and energy for her ‘real work’ outside of a full-time job on a library desk in her twenties. I could relate, but I still wasn’t entirely sure which one was my ‘real work’. Could I really be a writer? I’d go home from work and try to write in the evenings, buoyed by the thrill of having some of my work published. But the side-glances from publishing colleagues made it feel like you had to pick a side and go all in – you weren’t meant to have it both ways.

A few of Gillian’s letters were tiny square notes on slips of hand-painted paper: ochre over silver. There were Aboriginal artworks on Amnesty International cards, and typed group letters with personal additions in the margin as she updated her many correspondents on her health: ‘I really enjoyed re-reading the Meanjin interview. I hope that your own writing is going well.’ In 2003 she sent a note with an old book of Isak Dinesen stories. ‘Forgive this giant ramble,’ she wrote in a fourteen-page handwritten letter on lightweight, almost translucent, airmail paper: ‘It’s just the way I am these days. I write one letter every few weeks, putting aside FB [Foal’s Bread] on Sundays. I find if I start writing a letter, then I feel compelled to write to that lucky (or beleaguered) recipient all that I desire to speak to them about. So I’m not finished yet.’ Enclosed with the letter was a photograph of her kitten, curled up on a cluttered writing desk with the Grafton Gaol vegetable garden just visible through the window. ‘bel Canto June 2003 + penultimate draft of FOAL’S BREAD’ is written on the back. Her set-up is basic: a laptop propped on an upturned, lurid yellow, Cobram Fresh Fruit Company cardboard box.

‘Can I still write a letter? As I think I mentioned once before I am less and less a letter writer with all sorts of factors contributing to their decline in my life,’ she writes, in one of the last letters I received from her. Despite the sad tone, she seemed upbeat about the future, and spoke of her plans to become a nomad, with her characteristic humour shining through. ‘I admire your ability to operate in That world,’ she wrote, in response to a new publishing role I’d taken on. She mentioned selling more papers and documents to the State Library. ‘Soon of no fixed address’ is written on the back of the envelope.

In 2004, Gillian drove around Australia in her converted ambulance called Ant and Bee (documented by her in the pages of this magazine in 2007), and I flew overseas to live and work in London for four years. There I worked in book publishing on and off before taking a sidestep into magazines, websites and journalism. Preoccupied by writing articles for my employers, I stopped writing fiction altogether. Gillian and I fell out of touch.

—

Foal’s Bread was published in 2011. News of it being shortlisted for the Miles Franklin Literary Award and winning the Prime Minister’s Literary Award for Fiction, along with many other accolades, coincided with stories about how MS had caused Gillian’s health to deteriorate and her stance on voluntary euthanasia. By this time, I was pregnant with my second child and had to put Foal’s Bread to one side, to be read once the hormones stopped exacerbating the strong melancholic beauty of its story. The bookmark went in here:

Some fourteen-year-old mothers kill their firstborn with a stone. Or  dig a hole in the sand and bury it alive. Leave it in a forest or park or under a lonely bridge. Noah did none of those things. In the moonlight the shadows or pigs were looming and lengthening. She could hear the water galloping downstream like an old man drinking.

When my son was born the following year, one of the readings I chose for his naming ceremony was from Paradise Is a Place, which evoked the nostalgia for childhood I so love in Gillian’s writing:

I warm immediately to people with strong childhood memories. On the other hand if people tell me they can remember nothing of their childhood or its holidays I look at them carefully, wondering what reason have they to lie. I love to meet women and men who can recollect crying their eyes out on the car journey home from holidays.

We met again, fleetingly, in 2013 at the Sydney Writers’ Festival, when she was painstakingly signing copies of Foal’s Bread for a long queue of fans. When it was my turn, I hurriedly summarised my life with two small children. ‘Life takes twists and turns,’ she said. ‘I hope you find time for your own writing.’ I now ran my own company, ghostwriting articles for business clients. A very different kind of writing to the kind she meant, brought on by the pragmatic reality of choosing to live in Sydney.

When I thought about her carefully chosen words afterwards a peculiar type of guilt crept in. I was fortunate that I got paid well enough to write, but I also felt like the ultimate sellout. Why had I left it so long? Why hadn’t I made the time? There were many excuses – the messy obligations of family life, and a day job – but, after writing for work, I rarely had the discipline to write anything of my own. While some of the technical pleasures Gillian had described in that long-ago interview were still mine – the piecing, stitching and assembling of thousands of articles over the years – at the heart of what I did, the ‘why’ was different. And for my own writing, there were just as many reasons not to pick up a pen as there were to do so, leaving me in a balanced state of creative inaction. My short diary entry from the day of the festival contains a vow to ‘write something not for payment but for me’. Around this time I did, briefly, find my way back to creative non-fiction and was elated to have an essay published. Its presence only made the absence of many other unwritten words more obvious to me.

A few years later I bought my daughter Gillian’s children’s fable The Cat with the Coloured Tail, and we read it together, nurturing a love of sombre stories – and cats.

—

In 2016 I was breastfeeding my third child and aimlessly scrolling through social media when a headline in a news story startled me by revealing the news of Gillian’s death. She was fifty-one. It felt shockingly unfair. And so incongruous to discover this on Facebook. I turned back to her writing. ‘Writing is one way of putting a life into perspective,’ she had written in Paradise Is a Place, years before her diagnosis:

When I die much will still be left. My notebooks, I think, my wool bags, will never be emptied or filled, and what will anybody ever make of all these bits and pieces, these stories abandoned or so half told it is impossible to know the ending? Who sees the writing I leave in the sand at Diggers by poets or writers so long dead even their names have gone missing? […] Does it matter if the answer is no one?

My mother called the next morning, having read about her death in the newspaper, and encouraged me to start writing. Could writing help me make sense of this strangely affecting, distant loss and my own choices? After a few days of fits and starts while the baby slept, I had several thousand words. But I lost momentum, stymied by balancing the detail with the bigger picture. There were so many decisions: what to put in, what to leave out, and did any of it really matter to anyone but me? Half finished, half started, I abandoned it.

Four years after Gillian passed away, I was in the middle of an ordinary workday, ghostwriting articles for real estate agents, when I received an email from her biographer. She’d spent months ploughing through boxes of correspondence, diaries and other papers – and my interview. We chatted briefly on the phone. I tried and failed again to find the best words to make sense of a short but pivotal friendship and the ways it might have shaped me.

When the biography was published in late 2021, I was startled to see my name in the index and scattered throughout the endnotes. I felt exposed, and my heart raced as I checked each entry, wondering what I’d written or said all those years ago. As the anxiety subsided, I found that the many familiar excerpts from my thesis didn’t shame me: the interview had made a contribution. Meanwhile, I had returned to the essay, drawing new energy from a correspondence about it with editor Daniel Juckes. But it was hard to imagine eking out a living this way as Gillian had, the thick skin it required.

As I reworked the essay that summer, I decided to reread Fineflour. In the intervening decades, it felt like many of the uncomfortable truths and themes exposed or reflected in the book – and which run thick, in various ways, through the rest of her writing – were not only still relevant, but had gone mainstream: sexuality, violence, misogyny and racism. I passed it to my now-teenage daughter, and ploughed on, re-reading The Mint Lawn and The Grass Sister.

One afternoon, I dug out the long silver tin of keepsakes I’d moved from house to house over the decades. It was like opening a little time capsule of a very different time and place, one that I hadn’t realised I’d lost. The envelopes chronicled past addresses. Letters are a strong motif scattered through Gillian’s novels, essays and short stories. The Grass Sister is, in many ways, a book about letters. The narrator scours her old correspondence for clues to her sister’s disappearance: ‘There has long existed in our family not only the habit of writing letters but of reading old letters too. And of being influenced by them.’

I was doing the same – circling, looking for direction. The ribbon-tied bundle of Gillian’s letters in my keepsake tin gave tiny glimpses into five short years: a challenging time in Gillian’s life and a formative time in mine. Among the letters there was just one print-out of an email, about publishing the interview. ‘I want you to have some freedom. I hate it when people totally fetter me in what I want to write by demanding that they see all the drafts.’ There, too, was the note where she’d graciously said I could help her hone her interview skills. In reality it was me, taking my first uncertain steps towards honing my own interview skills, on that September day back in 1999. Skills I use every day now to make my living.

The bound thesis and full interview transcript with the original tapes were also there, backed up on a now-obsolete floppy disk. It was my turn to cringe at my own writing; so serious, contained and academic. I wanted to date-stamp it too. I’d moved on, inching closer towards that hybrid voice I’d wanted to explore way back when we met – more flexible, creative and personal.

Tucked alongside it all was the sourdough bread recipe that had faded to invisibility in some places on its shiny old fax paper. I’d made it a handful of times, but struggled to keep the starter culture going.

But this time, reading through the interview, something else she’d said jumped out: ‘Say I hadn’t started writing till I was forty, say I hadn’t gone to UTS, who knows then… If I had come to this raw material as a more mature woman, it really fascinates me to know what I would actually have written. It would have been very different.’