Remembering Georgia Blain: 'She was, frankly, magnificent'
Georgia Blain was one of Australia’s finest writers. She died on 9 December of brain cancer, just a few days shy of her 52nd birthday.
I’ve struggled to find words to write of her life: Georgia had no interest in false sentiment. She was not a romantic and, sharp as a tack, she could spot bullshit from miles away.
The first time I met Georgia was more than 20 years ago, through our mutual friend Katrina Sedgwick, the director of the Australian Centre for the Moving Image. We were standing on the roof of the Bondi Pavilion in summer, at dusk, overlooking the ocean. She had a drink in her hand and was standing beside her partner, the film-maker Andrew Taylor.
She was, frankly, magnificent: tall, straight-backed, poised, down to earth, observant. Her friend, the writer Charlotte Wood, has described Georgia as “present and vivid” and that’s exactly right.
I don’t want to lay claim to an intimacy Georgia and I didn’t have but, at the same time, I want convey a particular quality she had: an unswerving gaze, a huge capacity for accepting people’s faults, a capacity to talk about sadness without self-pity. She loved to laugh. I felt a great kinship with her, as I know many others did.
Her latest novel, Between a Wolf and a Dog (2016), explicated these qualities. That equanimity was hard won, though.
Georgia’s first novel, Closed for Winter, was published in 1998, several years after the publication of her mother Anne Deveson’s bestselling book Tell Me I’m Here. Both books charted, in very different ways, Georgia’s brother Jonathan’s struggle with schizophrenia, and his eventual death. In Georgia’s stunning non-fiction collection, Births Deaths Marriages (2008), she wrote something of her private life and the effect of it having been more publicly documented than many lives are. It was tough on her.
Georgia Blain (far right), with partner Andrew Taylor (front), and friends Shauna Wolifson, Kay Pavlou, Julianne Pierce and Katrina Sedgwick in 1995. Photograph: Kay Pavlou
After the publication of Closed for Winter, Georgia was incredibly productive as a writer at the same time as working as a journalist, a copyright lawyer and, for a time, the chair of the Australian Society of Authors. She wrote the short story collection The Secret Lives of Men (2013), the young adult novels Darkwater (2010) and Special (2016), and her novels Candelo (1999), The Blind Eye (2003), Names for Nothingness (2004), Too Close to Home (2011), and the recently published, brilliant, Between a Wolf and a Dog. She kept writing through her illness and its treatment, including a column for the Saturday Paper, which chronicled living with brain cancer.
There is no better way of remembering Georgia than reading her work. She was a born writer but also one who became more and more skilful, increasingly compelling. When I interviewed her for the literary magazine Meanjin in 2008 she said to me: “I think you get technically more adept as you go along but I don’t think your confidence necessarily gets better because you’re more aware of the pitfalls in the public process [and] because as you get technically more adept you try new things, things that you’re not so confident with.”
Georgia never stopped challenging herself. She was interested in the ways that our understanding of ourselves, our intimate relationships, and the wider political world, was constantly changing. She was interested in the malleability of grief. “Life’s constantly open to reinterpretation,” she said during that interview.
Between a Wolf and a Dog was published this year. Photograph: Scribe Publications
Georgia was born in 1964. Her father, Ellis Blain, was an ABC broadcaster who died in 1979. Georgia had been caring for her mother, Anne, who had Alzheimer’s disease, at the time of her own diagnosis. Anne died three days after her daughter, on 12 December.
When I interviewed Georgia back in 2008, I asked her how she dealt with the fact that people often spoke of her in relation to the tragedies of both her brother’s and her father’s premature deaths. Now of course, there is the awfulness of her own death, far too young, and her mother’s illness and death. Back then, Georgia said to me: “Those tragedies are a part of who I am, but I do feel strongly that they’re not all of who I am. [In my memoir I wanted to write] other pieces that dealt with more ordinary daily stuff, like dealing with the dog, the daily dynamics of just living and the stuff about becoming a mother. It’s all part of the fabric.”
In the final year of Georgia’s life, after her diagnosis, she spoke to me, with gratitude, of her surviving brother Joshua’s support. Andrew and her 17-year-old daughter, Odessa, were her priority and she wanted as much time with them as she could squeeze out of the life she had left. They were her everything.
The daily stuff of life continued to sustain her when the ground shifted so constantly. In her penultimate column for the Saturday Paper in July this year, she wrote: “When I first came out of hospital I just lay in the garden, in the shade of the jacaranda tree. There were only about three blossoms left, purple amid the beautiful new green feathery leaves. The sky above was tissue paper, Native American turquoise. Andrew often came out and lay on the grass next to me, and of course the dog stretched herself along the other side of him.”
Since I heard of her death I’ve found myself addressing her directly. “Do you mind if I say this? Is this too much, too personal? Have I got that detail right?” I want to keep talking to her.
The last time I saw her she was in conversation with Charlotte Wood, at the Melbourne writers festival. We hugged and she said, “I almost lost it,” referring to an emotional moment when she told the audience that it was only when she wrote that her awareness of illness slipped away. That self-deprecation was typical. She hadn’t lost it, though none of us would have minded if she had. Georgia was poised, warm and articulate until the end.