Bernadette Brennan is a 

critic and researcher of contemporary

Australian writing. Her most recent work, A Writing Life: Helen
Garner and Her Work, offers a fascinating literary portrait of one of
Australia’s best-loved authors. Bernadette’s literary criticism has
been widely published in Australia and abroad. She is the recipient
of the Copyright Agency’s inaugural Fellowship for Non-Fiction
and is currently one of five judges for the Miles Franklin Award.

Also by Bernadette Brennan

A Writing Life: Helen Garner and Her Work

Brian Castro’s Fiction: The Seductive Play of Language
Just Words?: Australian Authors Writing for Justice
(contributing editor)
Ethical Investigations: Essays on Australian Literature and Poetics
(editor)

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 The enigmatic
Gillian Mears
bernadette brennan

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 First published in 2021

Copyright © Bernadette Brennan 2021

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in

any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying,
recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without prior
permission in writing from the publisher. The Australian Copyright Act 1968
(the Act) allows a maximum of one chapter or 10 per cent of this book, whichever
is the greater, to be photocopied by any educational institution for its educational
purposes provided that the educational institution (or body that administers it) has
given a remuneration notice to the Copyright Agency (Australia) under the Act.

Grateful acknowledgement is given to the Copyright Agency for the Fellowship

that supported this project.

The extract from ‘Fern Hill’ on page 13 is reproduced with permission from the
Dylan Thomas Trust.
The extract from Leonard Cohen’s ‘Closing Time’ on page 300 is reproduced with
permission from Sony Music Publishing.
All original artwork included in this biography is by Gillian Mears.
The photographs of the Wisdom Quilt and Mears’ grave © Bernadette Brennan.
Unless otherwise specified, all other images included in this book are courtesy of the
Mears family.
The photograph on the page 300 is ‘Farewell to Gillian’, Ganges River, Varanasi,
1 November 2016. © Russell Shakespeare.

Every effort has been made to trace the holders of copyright material. If you have any
information concerning copyright material in this book please contact the publishers
at the address below.

Allen & Unwin

83 Alexander Street
Crows Nest NSW 2065
Australia
Phone: (61 2) 8425 0100
Email: [email protected]
Web: www.allenandunwin.com

A catalogue record for this

book is available from the
National Library of Australia

ISBN 978 1 76087 978 5

Index by Puddingburn Publishing Services

Set in 13.5/17.5 pt Granton LT by Midland Typesetters, Australia
Printed in Australia by McPherson’s Printing Group

10  9  8  7  6  5  4  3  2  1

The paper in this book is FSC® certified.

FSC® promotes environmentally responsible,
socially beneficial and economically viable
management of the world’s forests.

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 Contents

Introduction: For the record ix

Part I: A careful archaeology 1

1 The ever-present past 3
2 Finding a voice 15
3 Testing boundaries 29
4 The promising young writer 44

Part II: Freedom and risk 61

5 The letterwriter 63
6 Everything shifts 77
7 Mears girls 90
8 Uncharted territory 110

Part III: Ant and Bee 153

9 On the road 155
10 Paradise revisited 172
11 Betrayed by the body 192
12 A triumph, of sorts 213

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 Part IV: Slipping into history 229
13 A hymn of praise 231
14 Taking control 252
15 Weaving a legacy 267
16 Dancing into death 287

Epilogue 295
Acknowledgements 301
Notes 305
Awards and publications 333
Index 337

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 My own belief is that one regards oneself, if one is a serious writer,
as an instrument for experiencing. Life—all of it—flows through
this instrument and is distilled through it into works of art. How
one lives as a private person is intimately bound into the work.
And at some point I believe one has to stop holding back for fear
of alienating some imaginary reader or real relative or friend, and
come out with personal truth. If we are to understand the human
condition, and if we are to accept ourselves in all the complexity,
self-doubt, extravagance of feeling, guilt, joy, the slow freeing of
the self to its full capacity for action and creation, both as human
being and as artist, we have to know all we can about each other,
and we have to be willing to go naked.
May Sarton, Journal of a Solitude (1973),
transcribed by Gillian Mears 21 January 1997

Often the gap between the social person and the writing is great.
In Gillian it was very close.
David Malouf (March 2019)

In ‘life’, I don’t want to be reduced to my work. In ‘work’, I don’t

want to be reduced to my life.
Susan Sontag, As Consciousness is Harnessed to Flesh:
Journals and Notebooks 1964–1980 (2012)

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 Introduction

For the record

Writing is one way of putting a life into perspective, but

like an aunt from the olden days I piece together many
other things: photos into albums, posies into vases, squares
of knitting into rugs . . . leaves into compost, lines of poetry
into sand . . .
Gillian Mears, Paradise is a Place (1997)

Gillian Mears often likened herself to a Clarence Valley butcherbird,

a creature filled with beautiful song who could also peck out the eyes
of fledglings. Riven with contradictions, at times she wished that
she really was the innocent country girl many people perceived her
to be, yet as a writer she relished her dark secrets and trans­gressive
desires; they fuelled her pen. Mears’ lilting voice, ready smile and
sparkling eyes were magnetic. She drew people to her, while also
craving solitude. From her early teenage years she aspired to a life of
radical emotional and sexual freedom, yet she married her first lover
when aged only twenty. For much of her life Mears was cripplingly
shy, but while she eschewed public appearances, she was fearless in
her prose.

ix

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 LEAPING INTO WATERFALLS

Those who knew Mears best describe her as a deeply loving,

tender, self-­­
doubting woman who could also be determined,
uncompromising and self-­absorbed. She considered herself to
be both ‘perversely inward’ and insatiably curious. Mears was an
intensely relational person, known for her openness to the energies
of the people and world around her. She believed that societal
structures dulled one’s perception of reality; only in dissolving
them could freedom be found. She was drawn to the thrill of risk
in her personal and professional pursuits. That attraction was less
about bravado than her need for challenge and validation. Her
vulnerability manifested itself most obviously in her perpetual
self-­interrogation and her need to feel admired and loved.
Born in 1964, Mears was of the generation of Australian writers
who came after Helen Garner, Kate Grenville and Beverley
Farmer, all of whom she counted as mentors and friends, and who
she credited with giving her the confidence to write about child-
hood and the world of girls and sisters and mothers. Over thirty
years, Mears published three novels, nearly two hundred short
stories, poetry, feature journalism and a children’s book. From the
outset she enjoyed extraordinary literary success. Her stories were
commissioned and accepted enthusiastically by editors; many won
prestigious awards and were widely anthologised. All of her novels
won major national or international awards. Asked about why she
wrote, Mears explained that she was a compulsive person and that
writing was an addictive process. ‘It is a love of language rather
than a love of narrative that makes me a writer,’ she asserted. For
her sixteenth birthday her mother gave her a copy of the Concise
Oxford English Dictionary. Most days for the rest of her life she
would flip open one of her many dictionaries at random and study
with delight a double page of words and their meanings.

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 For the record

Mears described her fiction as having its ‘own particular auto-

biographical style’; it was a style which drew heavily, and directly,
from her life and the lives of her intimates, with added ‘little twists
to absolute truth’. So porous were the boundaries between her life
and fiction that during the course of my research I often became
confused. Had I read about certain events or conversations in
a story, novel, letter or diary? Or versions of them in all four? Yet
despite the fluid interchange and striking overlap, Mears’ life and
work stand apart. While her writing often caused great offence,
indeed pain, to some of those who found themselves easily recog-
nisable in it, most readers celebrate Mears’ talent without knowing
very much about her life. So why a biography?
First, because Mears is one of the most important Australian
female writers of the last forty years, yet two of her books are already
out of print. While her talent, and some aspects of her life, are
remembered and treasured within a select community of readers,
they deserve wider recognition and celebration. Second, because
Mears’ need to understand herself was one of the central forces of
her imaginative life. Third, as a writer and person, Mears grappled
with issues pertinent to many Australians: country-­town dynamics
and the opportunities afforded to girls, environmental degradation,
migrant belonging, white privilege, power and gender relationships,
fluid sexual identity, living with a grave disability.
Mears’ sensuality and sexuality were at the core of her identity
and her exploration of each informs all her writing. She stripped
herself bare metaphorically and, in a late essay accompanied
by a Vincent Long photograph, literally. She took strength and
comfort from Patrick White’s comment to Geoffrey Dutton,
which she transcribed into her diary in December 1991. ‘I expect
a lot of people will be furious and disgusted, but it has to come out

xi

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 LEAPING INTO WATERFALLS

the way it is coming. I feel more and more that creative activity
in the arts is very closely connected with sexual activity, and that
an awful lot of the insights I have had have come from that source.’
Some of Mears’ lovers have wondered, with hindsight, whether
she pursued relationships solely in order to discover more material
for her writing. Possibly she was motivated by her prodigious need
to open herself to experience in a quest for deeper self-­knowledge
and understanding.
A self-­proclaimed archivist, Mears amassed an extensive collec-
tion of material that charts her life from her early school years
until her death in 2016. She was a prolific correspondent with
a wide range of people, including many of Australia’s best-­known
writers, artists and photographers. Periodically she sent stamped,
self-­addressed envelopes to family members and select others
asking that her letters be returned. She valued them as an histori-
cal record. Did she, from the outset, have an eye to posterity? She
never said as much publicly, yet the writer Claire Aman, a close
friend and regular correspondent over the last decades of Mears’
life, admits that she knew their letters were as much about a future
archive as they were about friendship and communication. Mears
would likely have felt affirmed, encouraged, and perhaps even
a touch competitive when Gerald Murnane, with whom she also
had a voluminous correspondence, told her: ‘I suspect that my
collection of letters and manuscripts and private papers is the most
detailed, the most bulky, and the most candid and interesting of
any writer in Australia today.’
In 1994, under the Australian government’s Cultural Gifts
Program, Mears made the first donation of her papers to the State
Library of New South Wales. Additional donations followed in
1995, 1996 and 1998. Between 1999 and 2016 the Library purchased

xii

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 For the record

eight further collections from her. The Mears archive, second in

size only to the Library’s Fairfax archive, extends to twenty-­seven
metres of material held in 154 boxes. It includes manuscript drafts,
newspaper articles and reviews, notebooks, thousands of letters,
emails and text messages, hundreds of diaries, nearly six thousand
photographs and over four thousand negatives, thirty hours of
sound recordings, two hundred drawings and paintings, pressed
flowers, school reports and a weight of torn cardboard and scraps
of paper covered with Mears’ writing. Her currency, she said, was
‘paper with words written on it’ and she threw very little away.
Mears’ drive to record her life and preserve that record was
extreme. Late into the night and again well before dawn, she would
scribble her thoughts and feelings. When her right hand ached, she
would switch to her left. She wondered about her compulsive need
to document everything that happened in her day. Was it a kind of
loneliness? Sometimes Mears kept two, even three, diaries simul-
taneously. Often she made multiple entries in one day. Alongside
her most intimate thoughts, sexual fantasies and daily news, she
commented on national and international politics—Indigenous
rights, mass graves in Kosovo, environmental damage in Serbia,
unrest in East Timor, asylum seekers, and so on. She also tran-
scribed excerpts from a broad range of literature that resonated
with whatever was happening in her life at the time.
In 1991 Mears wrote that she gave ‘nobody any narratives’.
‘People have always misconstrued me. I leave [houses knowing]
a multitude of exciting episodes from their lives. They know
nothing of me.’ She considered her note-­keeping to be a secretive
impulse related to her addictive personality and that no one would
ever understand her multilayered hidden depths. But were those
depths unique? A cause for concern? As Garner, writing recently

xiii

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 LEAPING INTO WATERFALLS

about Murnane, noted: ‘he is describing a writer’s best self: secret,

private, unknown and unknowable to other people.’ In any case,
Mears poured herself into her diaries and ensured that one day they
would become very public. Not for her the approach articulated
by Swiss literary critic Jean Rousset, who wrote that ‘a founding
principle of the diary is a belief in its own privacy’. Mears not only
courted a reader, she directly addressed her imagined future bio­
grapher. In 1997, as she made a case for depositing her papers in
the State Library, she noted:

something in me views the historical record as very important,

even if it is only a record of a barely successful writer’s health
in the late 20th C or her life in a small town. A sentence or 2
that makes her laugh or that brings him closer to a feeling of
enlightenment. (Although I have to say, whenever I do think
fleetingly of a reader of this of the future, I always imagine
a young woman, with time on her hands obviously and a shy
manner.) Sometimes I think I know her. Perhaps she will be
me again, reborn, and still searching for the answers I hope to
find in my writing.
Anyway, whoever you are, hello, I acknowledge you may
exist when I am dead and that you’d prefer I wrote in my
mother’s hand, which is so large and flowing and easy to read.

Mears strove to shape and control the narrative that she was
certain would one day be told of her life, emending her diaries over
the years: ‘self-­censored first paragraph. I was already adrift with
lust AND I knew it’ (1991); ‘I was extremely ill psychologically in
ruins when I wrote this’ (2005). She sought freedom from misinter-
pretation, noting in June 2004: ‘not sure how much longer I’ll keep

xiv

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 For the record

writing like this—suddenly the unknown reader of the future all

to [sic] real, so that something in me begins to shrink back away
from your gaze, (mis)interpretations and thoughts of me.’
In her 2019 Hazel Rowley memorial lecture, Maria Tumarkin
argued that self-­representation in biography is a human right. The
biographer, she insisted, ‘listens’. They do not ‘have a conductor’s
baton in their hands . . . The person we put in our books is first
and foremost sovereign. Not a character, never a character. The
person’s life is much bigger than the book they are in, their mind is
much bigger.’ Janet Malcolm describes biography—‘the telling of
a life story that isn’t one’s own on the basis of oppressively massive
quantities of random, not necessarily reliable information’—as ‘an
unholy practice’. The telling is reliant on the biographer’s ‘powers
of discrimination’ and ‘capacity for sympathy’.
As Mears’ biographer, I have been granted access to a wealth of
material, most of which was created and curated by Mears herself.
Do l trust her diaries, knowing that they are often, by their very
nature, unreliable as records of fact and experience? Yes. I trust
them as diaries. And I have drawn on them extensively. I have
also had the benefit of interviewing Mears’ family, friends, peers,
therapists and lovers. Interestingly, most of her lovers suffered
heightened anxiety, even sleeplessness, before our meetings. In
being asked to return imaginatively to their time with Mears, they
were plunged back, to varying degrees, into an unsettling intensity
of experience and emotion. Those who revisited their own diaries
and correspondence from the time subsequently passed on their
records to me.
In 2011 Mears explained to journalist Linda Morris that she
viewed all her writing ‘as a kind of careful archaeology’, adding
that her intention was ‘for preservation’. This biography takes

xv

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 LEAPING INTO WATERFALLS

that metaphor as inspiration, while extending a different kind

of care. My primary intention is to celebrate Mears’ work while
also preserving a version of her life. In sifting through that life
and returning to sites of great significance, I am mindful of the
damage that may be done by excavation. Certain sites, therefore,
will remain only partially exposed. At the same time, I am acutely
aware that Mears as archaeologist has curated an archive that privi-
leges certain discoveries while striving to deflect focus from others.
Mears’ family continue to feel acutely the pain of her loss. Her
father Peter and sisters Yvonne, Karin and Sonya, despite ongoing
trauma and unresolved family wounds, have each been unstint-
ingly open and generous with their time and memories. They have
supported this biography out of love, respect and admiration for
their daughter and sister, aware that some uncomfortable truths
may be revealed.
I met Mears only the once. On 1 August, the horse’s birthday,
in 2012. I had not read a lot of her work at that point. We talked
easily for three hours, ranging over Australian fiction, poetry,
horses, childhood, and multiple sclerosis. If I had by then read
her diaries, we would have had so much more to say. Leaping into
Waterfalls is a continuation of that discussion, a more informed yet
still evolving encounter with Gillian Mears.

xvi

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 Part I

A careful archaeology

I am . . . sifting through my very short life and reassem-

bling it as best I may.
Gillian Mears, Late Night Live (2013)

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 1

The ever-­present past

I look at my writing as one big mosaic and it always brings

me back to my childhood which was very rich and dense
and blessed.
Gillian Mears, ‘My Country Childhood’,
Country Style (1997)

The photographs tell a story. Lanky little Mears girls run along an
empty beach. Four smiling sisters—Yvonne, Karin, Gillian and
Sonya—clean their teeth on the banks of the Mann River, and wrap
arms around each other’s shoulders under the mighty gums of Binna
Burra. In her essay ‘The Childhood Gland’, Mears writes: ‘We always
say our childhood was happy. Even though in some ways it was only
ordinary with ordinary kinds of distress.’ Their childhood was typical
in regional Australia in the 1960s: bush adventures, assorted pets,
neighbourhood farm animals, family camping trips—with hurri-
cane lanterns and campfire tales of faraway places. It was, perhaps,
less ordinary in the intensity of the familial bonds, bonds which were
a blessing, and at times a curse, on Mears’ later creative life.
Gillian Deborah Mears was born to Peter and Sheila in
Goonellabah, northern New South Wales on 21 July 1964.
­

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 A careful archaeology

Unusually for the times, Peter attended her birth. She was the third
of four girls, all born within five years, a birth order she attributed
to her becoming a ‘strategist in either how to be noticed or not to
be noticed’. Nipsy, Nipsle or Nipsy Beetle, as she was known in
her earliest years, was quiet, watchful. She was slow to walk and
did not speak until she was two and a half years old. On consulting
a paediatrician, her parents were assured that Gillian had no need
to speak; her older sisters anticipated her every wish. As a child,
she hovered so close to her mother that the family thought of her
as Sheila’s shadow. The intensity of that bond was the cause of real
trauma when, aged three, Gillian was hospitalised after having an
adverse reaction to sulphur drugs prescribed for gastroenteritis.
Often alone for one week, she became exceedingly anxious that
her mother had abandoned her.
Peter and Sheila had migrated from Africa to Lismore in
February 1962 when Peter was appointed as an agronomist with
the NSW Department of Agriculture. Yvonne was then nearly two
months old. With relief and excitement, they embraced Australia
as a fresh start for family life and career, distant from the politics
and racial tensions of South Africa and Rhodesia. Both Peter and
Sheila had been scarred by dysfunctional relationships with their
mothers; together they looked forward to raising a large, close-­
knit family in a loving, open environment. Goonellabah, on the
rural outskirts of Lismore, seemed like the perfect rural idyll.
Sheila was intent on fostering the creativity of their children
and instilled in them her love of language and classical music.
Books, she told them, were their best friends. In her melodious
English voice, she would recite classics, such as A.A. Milne’s
When We Were Very Young, and read bedtime fairytales. Stories
by Arthur Ransome, Nan Chauncy, Ivan Southall, Colin Thiele,

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 The ever-­present past

Hugh Lofting, Susan Cooper, Alan Garner, K.M. Briggs, Mary

O’Hara or Patricia Wrightson were treasured, but the girls’ favour­
ite writer was Tove Jansson. They created their own Moomin
world in which Sonya became Little My, Karin the Hemulen
Who Loved Silence, and Gillian the Fillyjonk, a timid, knobby-­
kneed character who believes in disasters and sees signs and omens
everywhere. Nipsy Beetle gave way to Fillyjonk, an identification
Mears embraced yet wrestled with in later years.
Under Peter’s influence the girls learned about the animal
world and the natural environment. The family joined the
Lismore Field Naturalists Club, a group of six families inter-
ested in exploring National Parks. On weekends and holidays the
group would camp, swim, birdwatch and bushwalk together at
Diggers Camp, the Mann River, Gibraltar Range or the Laming-
ton Plateau. In Paradise is a Place Mears celebrates the radiant joy
of those holidays. She treasured the freedom of the outdoors and
the feeling of belonging to something larger than her immediate
family: ‘in the communal living of the Naturalists Club camps
the rigidity of nuclear families goes into limbo.’ Diggers, in the
Yuraygir National Park—Gumbaynggirr and Yaygir country—
was Mears’ childhood beach, ‘the site of all summer pleasure and
sadness’. There the ‘intensity of being a family felt so much more
in a tent together at night’. At Diggers, writes Mears, ‘I learnt
my habits of secrecy . . . Enjoying the company of my family but
learning to be separate.’
Much of Mears’ writing is fuelled by her attempts to compre-
hend her family and her place in it. Her essays and stories offer an
image less Edenic than the story told by the early photographs. She
writes of ferocious, and sometimes overwhelming, sisterly love and
companionship, as well as petty hurts, sibling rivalries, shifting

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 A careful archaeology

allegiances and destructive hierarchies. Today, her sisters describe

their family as having been ‘enmeshed’. While that enmeshment
drew the Mears girls together as children and into adulthood, in
later life, it may well have contributed to tearing them apart. In his
unpublished memoir, which began as a taped conversation with
Gillian in 1983, Peter writes that ‘the relationships on which Sheila
and I tried to hold our family together through the girls’ child-
hood years have been upturned . . . Our family’s history reveals
deep unresolved divisions between parents and offspring.’
Peter’s parents, Budge and Betty, had migrated from England
to South Africa in the 1920s. Their plan to stay only temporarily
was thwarted by the Great Depression and then the Second World
War. Budge worked as an estates manager for the Forestal and
Timber Company, known locally as the Natal Tanning Extract
company. He supervised Zulu men in the planting and harvest-
ing of thousands of acres of Australian wattle trees, first in the
Transvaal and later in Zululand. Betty, born to a middle-­class
English family and educated at the exclusive Cheltenham Ladies’
College, maintained a strictly British household. Formal dining,
elevenses and evening drinks were served using silverware and
fine bone china.
Peter, an only child, was born in Pietermaritzburg on 7 January
1934. He spent his childhood on the plantations, moving easily
between the Zulu and English worlds. His mother was not physi-
cally affectionate. He credits Tabita, his Zulu nanny, as the person
who offered him unconditional love. Aged six he was fluent in
Zulu but could neither read nor write in English. At seven he was
sent to board at Cordwalles Prepratory School, a private school
for privileged white boys. At thirteen he moved to Michaelhouse,
a boarding school modelled on the English Public School system.

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 The ever-­present past

By the early 1940s Betty’s already erratic behaviour became

increasingly bizarre. She was convinced that Budge was a change-
ling, substituted for her husband by the Russians. She accused the
Zulu servants of spying on her. In company she became either
withdrawn and silent or violent and abusive. Peter and Budge
coped by variously appeasing her, making excuses to others or
avoiding her altogether. A Durban psychiatrist diagnosed paranoid
schizophrenia.
After leaving school, Peter enrolled in a degree in pasture
management and soil conservation at Natal University College.
When Budge died of a cerebral haemorrhage in July 1954, Peter
became the primary carer for his domineering, unstable mother,
a situation he found increasingly untenable. After his graduation
in 1956, they flew to England with a plan that Betty would live
there, and Peter would return to Rhodesia and take up a position
as a soil conservation officer. In November 1957 Betty arrived
back in Rhodesia, ostensibly for a short holiday. When it became
apparent that she intended to live with Peter indefinitely, he deter-
mined that his employment and his sanity were at risk. He applied
for leave and took Betty to England, hoping to have her certified.
Dr Alick Elithorn, a respected psychiatrist at London University,
assessed Betty as being eccentric and borderline schizophrenic. He
told Peter that she would cope on her own. It was Peter he was
worried about; Betty would destroy him.
Peter was only twenty-­three. He informed his mother that he was
returning to Rhodesia alone. The next morning, he set off from their
hotel before dawn. Halfway to the train station Betty appeared. She
wrested his travel bag from him, believing that he could not leave
without it. While Betty dragged the bag back to the hotel, Peter
rushed on to the station. He never saw his mother again and they

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 A careful archaeology

never reconciled. She refused to acknowledge his later marriage or

children, but did occasionally send books and cards, addressed only
to him. Betty died from gangrene in March 1971.
One year after returning to Rhodesia Peter met Sheila. She too
had a fraught family history. Sheila was born to Bernard (Barney)
and Patricia Mahon in London on 17 March 1936. Soon after her
birth Barney exhibited the first signs of multiple sclerosis. After
gradually losing the ability to walk he was hospitalised at Saint
John of God hospice in Scorton, North Yorkshire. Patricia had
a son to another man and christened him Bernard. During the
Blitz, Patricia evacuated Sheila and Bernard to a catholic convent
at Copthorne, West Sussex. Sheila felt abandoned. Throughout
her life she refused to discuss her time in the convent and would
weep when asked. In her forties she wrote a story about a paedo-
phile priest.
When Sheila and Bernard returned to London after the war,
Barney’s brother, a traumatised returned soldier, was living with
Patricia. He was verbally and physically abusive. After a psychotic
episode in which he tried to stab Patricia, he was certified and
taken to an asylum. Over the years, Patricia moved a series of lovers
into the home. At seventeen an exasperated Sheila left, carrying
only a suitcase. Patricia told her never to return. Sheila trained as
a secretary and had a number of lovers herself, often older men,
during the 1950s. In Peter’s words, ‘She was glamorous, attractive
and vulnerable’. Bernard, meanwhile, had emigrated to Rhodesia.
On a visit home to London, concerned about Sheila’s lifestyle and
her slow recovery from a kidney operation, he bought her a ticket
to visit him. She sailed into Cape Town on the Athlone Castle in
1959, intending to travel on to Canada. Shortly after she met Peter
at a party in Rhodesia, and they married in April 1960. That same

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year Barney, by now blind and having suffered bilateral above-­knee

amputations, died.
Mears was fascinated by her parents’ childhoods and her absent
grandmothers. In her diary of 15 April 1988 she recorded: ‘I realize
as I write that my mother’s childhood has assumed huge, mytho-
logical proportions in my mind. The terrors of it, only ever hinted,
stretch enormously.’ In her 1990 application for an Australia Council
fellowship she proposed a novel that ‘spins around stories of my
schizophrenic grandmother’s life in the Zululand and Rhodesia of
the 40s and 50s’, noting: ‘It will further a preoccupation my fiction
has often explored: the notion and the power of mothers who meta-
phorically, psychologically or physically abandon their family. And
the way the memory of that absence splinters through generations
and countries and leaves a trail of unease.’
That novel became The Grass Sister, a book in which stories of
both grandmothers ‘hung in the air around us as warnings’.
In March 1973 Peter, Sheila and the children travelled to
England to settle Betty’s estate. The children were allowed to choose
anything from Betty’s possessions, which included silver, china,
duelling pistols and lace. Gillian’s first choice was a blank piece of
paper. She wrote on it, ‘This piece of paper is over 100 years old’
and for years carried it in her music box. When the family went
on to holiday in Europe for six months, nine-­year-­old Gillian kept
a meticulous journal of the ‘great adventure’, noting the daily game
of ‘Madness’ which involved dressing up as a ‘fat mad grandma’.
In Norway she dislocated her elbow, requiring her left arm to be in
a sling. In Athens she was enthralled by the Parthenon and filled her
sling with potsherds; her interest in archaeology was fired.
Soon after their return to Australia in late 1973 the Mears
family moved to Grafton and lived in the old ferryman’s house in

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Miller Street. Initially, Gillian felt a strong sense of displacement

from life at Goonellabah; gone was Mr Greenwood’s neighbour-
ing dairy, the fallen log where she and her sisters ate their morning
porridge, the cow ribs they collected for sword fights. Yet Grafton
proved to have its compensations. Their backyard sloped down to
the flood-­prone Clarence River. With each flood, the dramatist in
her hoped the levee banks would fail: ‘I can remember standing at
the top of the levee bank that ended our garden willing the water
to keep rising. I was ten. I wanted the river in town in the way of
the old flood photos at the museum. Kangaroos on pub rooves.
Boats going through MacKellys.’
Much to Sheila’s dismay, horses became part of the girls’ lives.
Yvonne, a fearless rider, wanted a mate. She and Karin were prone
to fights, Sonya was too young, so Yvonne chose Gillian; she put her
once on a horse and convinced Peter that she could ride. He bought
her Flicker, a taffy pony, a bolter. Away they went. Where Yvonne
led, Gillian followed. In the early mornings they galloped down
the old Arthur Street stock route, jumped over enormous ditches,
picnic tables, gravestones and racetrack railings. They swam the
horses across the fast-­flowing Clarence. For Gillian it was both terri­
fying and exhilarating. Riding boosted her confidence. Equally, as
the child of migrant parents, it made her feel more Australian. She
loved the people she met through horses, particularly the old men
of Grafton. Her closest friend was Sandra Watkins, another horse
girl, whose parents trained racehorses. After school Gillian and
Sandra would swim and play in the Clarence, then it was a wild
ride down to visit Merv Mulligan and revel in his tales of droving,
high-jumping and outback life.
Sheila wanted each of her children to learn a musical instru-
ment. Feeling she had been denied the opportunity to fulfil her

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own creative dreams, she was ambitious for her daughters to

achieve. Initially she concentrated her attention on Karin, who, as
a violinist, appeared to be the most talented musician of the four.
Once it became obvious that Gillian was a gifted flautist, as well
as going to excel academically, Sheila shifted her focus. Yet while
Gillian was always the conscientious student, she had little time
for music practice. Between the ages of ten and sixteen nothing
was more important to her than riding well. Sheila felt slighted.
As Mears would later write: ‘our messiness, our horsiness betrays
[our mother]. To an extent she begins to abandon us and we barely
notice. She tells the same unhappy stories of her own childhood
until we stop listening.’
A darkness crept into their lives. An increasingly unhappy and
frustrated Sheila smashed plates in fits of anger and threatened to
leave. For a brief period in the late 1970s she had affairs. ‘In the
ferryman’s house there is a man in our mother’s bedroom who isn’t
our father.’ There were ‘shadows’ in the house that ‘move slowly
and take years to decipher’. In 1978, when Gillian was nearly
fourteen, Sheila followed a lover to Russia. And came home again.
The girls approached puberty uninhibited about their bodies.
‘We all wander around with no clothes on. Our mother banishes
our father to the cement bathroom downstairs.’ Bodily func-
tions and sexual desire were open topics of family conversation,
perhaps too open. The adult Mears would write of her discomfort
at her mother’s discussions about lovers. ‘Tell us something else,
we wanted to ask. Meaning tell us something normal, meaning
tell us something not about sex.’ Children and adolescents in her
fiction often see things they should not and wrestle with the impli-
cations of what they have seen. As a teenager Mears was troubled
by the deep undercurrents of arousal she was experiencing. She

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borrowed her father’s pornographic magazines and by her own

account was a ‘mad masturbator’. She felt no shame, she did not
know ‘what the waves of pleasure were’, but she knew to keep the
extent of her desires secret. All the while she watched, and tried
to interpret, the goings-­on at her parents’ increasingly drunken
parties. She was unsettled by what she saw and intuited.
At thirteen she became ‘entranced’ by Tony Payne, her English
teacher. Payne, who had a deep respect for Australian literature,
introduced her to Randolph Stow’s The Merry-­Go-­Round in the Sea,
a book she would return to repeatedly. A particular passage—‘The
mare kept listening, her ears back, trying every now and again
to turn her head. She’s keeping track . . . She hears the country
she’s leaving. It must be like music, growing fainter’—filled her
with ‘a shivery delight’. Stow’s words evoked ‘strange feelings in
[her] belly and bones’ like those she experienced when riding in
semi-­darkness past her teacher’s house. In 2002 Mears published
‘Inspirations’, an essay that celebrates Payne’s and Stow’s influence
on her imagination. She began the first of her twelve drafts of the
essay, not an unusual number for her: ‘At thirteen I wanted to dance
with my black-­haired English teacher. Using steps made of wooden
school chairs, I wanted us to ascend his desk, there for us to dance
a quick foxtrot until all the fear shining out of our bodies would
vanish.’
Payne was the first in Mears’ search for ‘magical teachers
who’d take the edge off any of my great fears’. She fell ‘wholly and
achingly in love with the ones who seemed most to hold answers
to the secrets about me’. She was fourteen when Stephen Tatham
arrived at Grafton High School. Tatham taught English and history
and he supplanted Payne in Mears’ adolescent fantasies. He intro-
duced her to Ecclesiastes, and to the poems of Philip Larkin and

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novels of Carson McCullers. She reread McCullers’ The Member of

the Wedding almost every year for the rest of her life.
The perfectionist Mears was driven to achieve at school. Her
report cards, which she kept from Grade 5 onwards, record her
consistent academic excellence. She was also gifted athletically,
being a champion sprinter, hurdler and long-­jumper. However,
the thought of public speaking paralysed her, and she contem-
plated more than once ways to injure herself to avoid that ordeal.
Her social awkwardness in these teenage years was ameliorated by
her close relationship with Sandra, and her sisters. Most mornings
the Mears girls would cycle four abreast down the wide Grafton
streets to school. The eldest three sat together in the playground,
part of the same friendship group. Some weekends Peter would
transport all four and their horses to Diggers Camp, where he
co-owned a block of land with a freestanding shower and toilet
structure. He would set up an electric fence and leave them to camp
and enjoy their freedom. All the while Mears was nursing a deep
anxiety. As an adult she insisted that from the age of fourteen she
felt panicked that her ‘glorious childhood’ was galloping away.
Her favourite poem was Dylan Thomas’ ‘Fern Hill’:

And as I was green and carefree, famous among the barns

About the happy yard and singing as the farm was home,
In the sun that is young once only,
Time let me play and be
Golden in the mercy of his means
. . .
Oh as I was young and easy . . .
Time held me green and dying
Though I sang in my chains like the sea.

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On 2 July 1980, just weeks before turning sixteen, Mears

learned the shocking news that Sandra’s mother, Joy, had shot
Sandra, her younger brother Johnny and herself. Joy and Johnny
died instantly but Sandra survived for almost a day. Mears insists
that her childhood ended that day. Shattered and inconsolable she
retreated into herself. She was incapable of attending Sandra’s
funeral. In her diary she tried to process this inexplicable act. She
recorded how she had been ‘violently disrupted’ by Sandra’s death.
For months she wrestled with nightmares, waking ‘scared, aching
with a longing for the past and a longing for human contact to
fade the bleak facts from my trembling soul’. Sandra’s murder
fuelled an obsession with death. It amplified Mears’ already fierce
nostalgia for the innocence of her childhood. And it informed her
writing and some of her significant life choices in the years to come.

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