Beverley Farmer died on Sunday 15 April at 77 after a long struggle with Parkinsons Disease. Those of us who met her on rare public appearances or at residencies in Universities nationally and internationally will remember a reserved, intelligent, gracious woman who inspired students with her quiet but evident passion for writing. Her contribution to Australian Literature is notable for its quality, diversity and innovation. A highly skilled observer, BeverleyFarmer leaves us short stories, novels, essays, poetry, photography and insightful criticism and, perhaps most memorably, a prose style of great beauty and precision.
The first novel Alone and initial collections of short stories Milk (1983) Home Time (1985) figured prominently in discussions of emerging women’s writing in Australia in the 1980s as they articulated the politics of gendered and cross-cultural relations. Since then post-feminist, post-modernist and post-structuralist critical appreciations have influenced the changing climate of literature in Australia. This writer found distinctive ways to engage with the business of representation, inscription and textuality by drawing on translation, the visual and graphic arts and reconsidering the formative effects of time, memory and inheritance. In The Seal Woman (1992) and The House in the Light (1995) Farmer used montage-like sequences to investigate a broad spectrum of diverse cultural myths and realities confronting the hard truths of imminent world environmental damage and conflicting cultural ideologies. In the 1990s A Body of Water (1990) crossed generic lines between journal, essay and short story to win awards for non-fiction. This meditative and inclusive text shared the processes of literary creation.
Her mature writing embraced further sophisticated explorations of the nature of translation as film, photography, painting and representation. Farmer’s black and white photography illustrates recent publications and in ‘Seeing in The Dark’ from The Bone House language ‘works like a lens that opens onto sequential fields of vision, changing in focus, expanding between temporality and timelessness and contracting to frame transparencies of light’. The Bone House, described as a meditation on the life of the body and the life of the mind, employs thematic symbols of earth, and water, fire and blood, light and darkness’, elemental themes that also inform the final collection of stories This Water: Five Tales.
In 2009 the Patrick White Award placed Farmer among peers like Christina Stead, Elizabeth Harrower, Thea Astley, Janette Turner-Hospital, Fay Zwicky, John Romeril and Gerard Murnane.
On hearing the news, Beverley Farmer acknowledged her pleasure in being counted among prestigious company, particularly citing Rosemary Dobson, Randolph Stow and Marjorie Barnard as ‘guiding lights’. These preferences were telling: a meditative poet who celebrates the wonder, fragility and tenacity of human existence, a writer of fiction whose exploration of the metaphysics of being and spiritual journeying and a pioneering writer of short fiction whose insightful, non-romantic portraits of relationships and women’s lives became an exemplar for women writers in this country.
In her latest collection, This Water: Five Tales, completed under extreme difficulty but with even greater precision, archetypal legends of women’s experience are re-envisioned and imaginatively transformed. Beverley’s family, friends, colleagues and community in Pt Lonsdale will mourn her passing. Australian Literature has lost a remarkable voice.
