Patricia Clarke

After she left journalism, Patricia Clarke turned to researching and writing books, beginning with The Governesses in 1985. Bold Types is her fourteenth book. The Canberra writer was a familiar figure at media history and other conferences, and in the National Library of Australia reading rooms, until Covid-19 at least. Her books, augmented by dozens of articles and conference papers, focus mainly on the lives, careers and letters of Australian women, especially writers and journalists. Clarke also writes about the history of her city, Canberra, an interest reflected in some of the fourteen entries she has produced for the Australian Dictionary of Biography. The ninety-six-year-old has devoted nearly ‘half a lifetime’ (to borrow the title of one of her tomes, about Judith Wright) to historical endeavours.

Judith Wright and Barbara Patterson met at a gathering of the Barjai group, a Brisbane salon for young poets and artists, when Judith was almost twice Barbara’s age. Judith had not yet published her first collection, The Moving Image (1946). She read some poems and Barbara was magnetised.

These two volumes are a credit to their publishers. The format of The Equal Heart and Mind, a new departure for UQP, is slightly smaller than the usual paperback. The pages are deckle-edged, and the cover, in brilliant tones of magenta and purple, has its edges folded in on themselves as if to enclose and protect the contents. Very effective! In the National Library production of Birds: Poems by Judith Wright, the poems are accompanied by pictures from the National Library of Australia’s Pictures Collection, many by colonial artists. Paintings such as J.W. Levin’s ‘Rainbow Bee-Eater’ (1838) and E.E. Gostclow’s ‘Black Cockatoo’ (1929) are rarely seen masterpieces. This edition is a collector’s piece, worth buying for the pictures alone. Let’s hope that these two books herald a renewal of interest in Wright and her work.

About ten years ago, I was asked to give a talk to a Sydney group of Australian writers. (Actually, they asked Leonie Kramer, but she was busy.) I decided to talk on ‘Some unknown Australian women writers of the nineteenth century’ in ‘the hope of interesting some of them in researching the lives and careers of their predecessors.