Nadia Wheatley’s introduction is valuable, reminding the reader of some of the material and psychic conditions of the time, as well as the conditions of Clift’s life as immigrant to a country she was born in. Returning to Australia after fourteen years allowed her to ‘observe Australian society from the position of outsider as well as insider, and while she berated those who blindly ‘knocked’ the country, she often criticised its culture and mores’. It is interesting, too, to read about some of the background to Clift’s column, the liberties that she was afforded in editorial policies, what caused ructions, and how popular the writing was, how devoted her readership was to her ideas.

Through these essays, and particularly the ones that discuss conscription for service overseas (‘On Lucky Dips’), the visit of Lyndon Johnson to Australia, and political protest movements, shifts can be identified: the movement of debates into the mass media, and in a reputable form. Clift also enters into a dialogue with her readership. As Wheatley says, ‘Charmian Clift was in immediate personal communication with her readers, simultaneously responding to their feelings and expressing what they themselves would have liked to say, if they’d had her eloquence and opportunity’.

Betty Roland’s third volume of memoirs meanders, in the way that a book of a woman looking back on eighty-seven years should. It is written straight – without a lot of refining, and without needing it, either; a well-crafted book is not the most important outcome of an exercise such as this.

I haven’t read the two earlier volumes, but it seems that Roland chooses as the main focus within all of them the action of her sex life: the pursuit of happiness by means of it, the pleasure of sexual contact, a testing out of the field. And even after the pursuit of sexual companionship has been abandoned, there are meditations on how this pursuit has affected the life, what it meant to the rest of her pursuit of happiness or satisfaction. It is always exciting and liberating to read accounts from people of older generations of their sexual mores and games, and so rare from Australian writers. This book is full of it. Roland declares herself promiscuous, often referring to a belief in letting nature take its course (and to falling in love occasionally, too).

Roland is frank about details of her sexual adventures and the men she slept with – those she chose as partners, and those who forced themselves upon her, usually in the dead of night. Her straightforward delivery of opinions and observations about such issues as men and sex, infidelities, jealousies, homosexuality, often make them sound a little ingenuous, but I think they are much more than that – and they are lacking in any embarrassment.

The other main concern that comes out of the telling of Roland’s life is the tension between the writing and reputation to which she aspired, and the writing she had to do to earn a living. The success of her first play, The Touch of Silk, in 1928 and then her being lauded as ‘Australia’s first genuine playwright’ by the Bulletin’s critic had made it difficult to swallow the subsequent lack of recognition and hack-work writing radio soapies and newspaper serials which had sustained her over a long period. She attacks Kylie Tennant, who won the Commonwealth Jubilee Prize for Drama:

It is possible that Kylie needed the Jive hundred pounds Jar more than I did, but she did not need the boost to her reputation as a writer in the way that I did. I was filled with disgust at the rubbish I had been churning out. Top ratings did not impress me in the least, they merely indicated the lack of taste on the part of the people who listened. I wanted to be recognised as a serious playwright ... Disappointment turned to indignation when I read Kylie’s play ...

And at this point she leaves Australia ‘to the Philistines’, departing for London to seek some recognition.

The book covers her life from 1935 to about 1955, difficult years of transition and many upheavals; broken relationships, the birth of her daughter and the experience of single parenting, economic instability, unsatisfying work, withdrawal from the sexual field. It is a revealing book, honest and often amusing.

Marion Halligan’s book Eat My Words dabbles with all of her passions in all their manifestations: food, culinary experiences and extravagances, storytelling, other cultures (particularly French). It’s a rambling account, offering a personal history of the development of a sophisticated approach to food and wine in Australia, culminating in elaborate descriptions of the banquets that were the Symposiums of Australian Gastronomy, starting in 1984 and marking the coming of age of Australia’s cuisine. Halligan also provides recipes, favourite methods of preparing foods, advice in many areas – transforming the domestic into the truly artful. There is a travelogue, too; wonderfully rich stories of dinners consumed, or experienced, in France, the rituals of buying Roquefort cheese. And, along the way, musings about the history of cookery books, philosophies of food and obsessions with ritualistic order.  

What the book reminded me of most was, a little obviously, Peter Greenaway’s film, The Cook, the Thief, His Wife and Her Lover, for its attention to detail that becomes obsessive – without the cruelty and the sex, of course. It also reminded me how young this country still is, how recently this sophisticated approach to cuisine has been introduced and developed, and how heavily we lean on Europe, particularly France, for guidance and confirmation. It is still an acutely self-conscious process of learning.

Halligan’s book is filled with literary references, too, and French literature and gastronomic writing is quoted (much of it in French). It will appeal to many readers who enjoy dabbling in things cultural, and the recipes are a bonus. With the passionate approach Marion Halligan has followed, I am sure that they are fine and accurate recipes.