‘I want to be a Clifty’: Charmian Clift’s unfinished last novel finally gets its moment

Australian author Charmian Clift writes on a terrace in Hydra, Greece, in 1958. Her third novel, The End of the Morning, has been published 62 years after Clift began writing it and 55 years after her death. Photograph: Clift estate

On the island of Hydra in the summer of 1962, the author Charmian Clift began working on her third novel, The End of the Morning. Written from the perspective of an adolescent girl named Cressida Morley, Clift reached back into her own childhood in Kiama, New South Wales, swapping the whitewashed walls and Aegean seascapes of her adopted home for memories of hot tar, sand dunes, basalt columns and sibling rivalry.

“Our childhood became a straining to get it out of the way as quickly as possible, to fling off the dragging years of dependence and get on with the big adventure,” Clift wrote.