We learn, in the normal run of things, that we have to part from our parents and their generation, whether early or late in our own lives. But somehow we nourish the belief that our friends are going to be with us until a kind of joint ending occurs.
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.
Significantly, each of us had experience of village in life in Greece, although Beverley lived here long before I arrived, and her village is in the north of the country, while mine is almost as far south as it is possible to go on the Balkan Peninsula. For that reason we never met in Greece, although there were phone calls, and there were always letters; we met instead in Melbourne, Geelong, Point Lonsdale, London, Oxford, and Canterbury.
The memories come rushing back. A day in Oxford, among the dreaming spires, where Beverley, a gifted photographer, took a great many pictures. A visit to Canterbury Cathedral where, used to free and easy Orthodox services, during which people stroll in and out of church, we were startled to be met, once a heavy door was opened, by a figure clad in deep black, cadaverous of mien, and sepulchral of voice.
'Evensong is in progress,' he intoned, and there was no invitation to enter the hallowed space. 'Straight out of Trollope,' remarked Beverley, making me laugh. (We laughed a lot during our times together, I recall.) We waited outside, and eventually toured the Cathedral, standing silently at the scene of the martyrdom of St Thomas a Becket. And Beverley took more photographs.
"In a letter I have just re-read, Beverley refers to Greece as 'that bitter place that matters so much'. How accurate such a description is."
Wherever and whenever we met, we talked about Greece, about which country we felt deeply ambivalent, despite our shared love of its landscape, lore, and history. In a letter I have just re-read, Beverley refers to Greece as 'that bitter place that matters so much'. How accurate such a description is. Greece was, however, an early inspiration and source of creativity for her: her early stories often centered on young Greek-Australians and the shock of the old that they experienced in their harsh ancestral villages where there are still few filters.
Beverley herself was a deeply private person, one of shining intelligence, dignity and grace, who was passionate about writing, and a perfectionist in the practice of it. She was also a mighty reader, reading about 250 books a year.
Always interested in the whole business of creativity, she explored the various forms of it in A Body of Water, which is a writer's notebook studded with short stories. This volume was published in 1990, and such exploration continued: 15 years later The Bone House consisted of three long essays (supported by a dauntingly long bibliography) that are a meditation on the life of the body and the life of the mind. One of the questions that emerges from the work is: What does art know that we do not?
Beverley matured into a great prose stylist, which may be one reason she never received the wide attention she so much deserved. The mainstream reader, most often wanting page-turning action, does not always appreciate nuance, subtle manipulation of language, and the expansion of prose into poetry.
Her peers, however, appreciated Beverley and her writing: she won the NSW Premier's Award for Fiction in 1984, The House in the Light was shortlisted for the Miles Franklin Literary Award in 1996, and she won the Patrick White Award in 2009. Beverley's last book was This Water; Five Tales, written during the last phase of her long illness. Her prose style has been praised as being even more precise in this book, which consists of a re-working of archetypal legends about women. It was long-listed for the Stella Prize.
Lyn Jacobs of Flinders University wrote recently that Beverley's death means that Australian literature has lost a remarkable voice. How absolutely true. And I have lost a friend.
Gillian Bouras is an expatriate Australian writer who has written several books, stories and articles, many of them dealing with her experiences as an Australian woman in Greece.
Ref: Published on Eureka Street by Gillian Bouras 26-April-2018. Read original article
