Share:
Farmer's characters are often portrayed in ‘in-between’ states, in transition – culturally, socially, physically – and she pursues their fluctuating thoughts and emotions with fine discrimination, and a determination to bring to the surface the anxieties, the anger, the impulses to cruelty – and the ecstatic moments too – which lie within those thoughts. There is no aspect of experience she is not prepared to explore, and observe, in the most exacting detail.
Beverley Farmer is important to Australian literature for many reasons. She was one of the first to carry the cultural elements of the post-war migration into the mainstream of Australian writing, combining Greek and Mediterranean subjects and ways of seeing with the more familiar northern European influences, and those of Asian Buddhism as well. She was one of the leading figures in the renaissance of Australian women’s writing in the 1980s, and one of the boldest. This was at a time when short story collections by women writers were the first thing you saw when you entered a bookshop, and her books Milk and Home Time were chief amongst them. We are used to thinking of the encyclopaedic reach, from the detail to the horizons it envisions, as a masculine aspiration (in Les Murray, Murray Bail or Gerald Murnane for example) – but in works like A Body of Water, The Bone House and This Water, Beverley Farmer claimed this aspiration for women writers, and demonstrated her mastery of it. To my mind it is her bending and opening up of literary form to accommodate this large vision – which she saw as the ‘whole symbolic world in every one of us, teeming with images, dreams, reflections, speculations, memories’ – that is her great contribution to Australian literature. Read more
It's a deluded, dream-like state, this, and all too often we are forced, joltingly, to wake up and cope with what we consider to be an unnatural death. It has been written that our losses are like worm-casts, growing beside us and accumulating for as long as we ourselves live. But I think losses are more often like looming mountains.
Writer Beverley Farmer died on 16 April. She and I had been friends, albeit usually long-distance ones, for more than 30 years. It seems to me now that we had so much in common that friendship was almost inevitable: it was just a matter of timing that first meeting.
Much of an age, we had been brought up in a similar way, I deduced; we attended the same university college, although not at the same time, and her most influential teacher became my university mentor. We married Greek men, and Beverley's son is the same age as my eldest son; eventually we both, to our great joy, acquired granddaughters. As well, we were both published by that trail-blazing firm McPhee Gribble. And we were letter-writers. Read more
The Patrick White literary award was created in 1972 to recognise writers ‘who have made a substantial contribution to Australian literature but... may not have received due recognition for their work’. In 2009 the Victorian novelist, essayist and poet, Beverley Farmer, is its worthy recipient. Read more