Charmian Clift and George Johnston House, Hydra Island Greece
The house where Charmian Clift and George Johnston, the Australian writers, live during their time on Hydra Island Greece.
Here are directions from the port.
From the east corner with the Nerieds Shop on the corner, head inland off the port towards the Amalour Bar.
At the Amalour, take the right side fork and go straight passing the entrance to the Bratsera Hotel on your left.
At the back of the Bratsera where the lane widens to a square, go straight, passing the Erofili Pension on your right.
At the T-Junction, turn right into the dining square of the Xeri Elia (Douskos) Taverna.
Exit the taverna square from the corner diagonally opposite, passing the To Geitonikon Taverna on your left.
Take the 2nd lane past the Geitonikon which opens into the square with the Wellhead outside Charmian Clift's house.
Clift was born in Kiama, New South Wales in 1923. She married George Johnston in 1947. They had three children, the eldest of whom was the poet Martin Johnston. After Clift and Johnston's collaboration High Valley (1949) won them recognition as writers, they left Australia with their young family, working in London before relocating to the Greek island of Hydra to try living by the pen. She met the songwriter Leonard Cohen whilst there in 1960.
Johnston returned to Australia to receive the accolades of his Miles Franklin Award-winner My Brother Jack. Clift moved back to Sydney with their children in 1964, after which her memoirs Mermaid Singing and Peel Me a Lotus and her novel Honour's Mimic became successes.
She was also well known for the 240 essays she wrote between 1964 and 1969 for The Sydney Morning Herald and The Herald in Melbourne. They were collected in the books Images in Aspic and The World of Charmian Clift.[1] In the meantime, Clift and Johnston's marriage was disintegrating under the pressures of their drinking habits and the problems their children had settling into life in Sydney.
On 8 July 1969, the eve of the publication of Johnston's novel Clean Straw for Nothing, Clift committed suicide by taking an overdose of barbiturates in Mosman, a Sydney suburb.[3] Academics Paul Genoni and Tanya Dalziell suggest in their 2018 book Half the Perfect World that it was the impending publication of Johnston's novel, which Clift knew would lay bare her infidelities whilst on the island of Hydra, which prompted her to suicide.[4] In her posthumously published article My Husband George in that month's edition of POL Magazine, she wrote:
I do believe that novelists must be free to write what they like, in any way they liked to write it (and after all who but myself had urged and nagged him into it?), but the stuff of which Clean Straw for Nothing is made is largely experience in which I, too, have shared and ... have felt differently because I am a different person ...
Her ashes were later scattered in the rose garden of the Northern Suburbs Crematorium in Sydney.