In this episode of Biographers in Conversation, award-winning biographer Dr Bernadette Brennan chats with Dr Gabriella Kelly-Davies about her choices while crafting Leaping into Waterfalls: The Enigmatic Gillian Mears, the biography of Gillian Mears, one of Australia’s most celebrated authors.
Winner Magarey Medal for Biography 2022
Winner National Biography Award 2022
Winner The Age Book of the Year Award, Non-Fiction 2022
Leaping into Waterfalls
Leaping into Waterfalls is a literary biography that explores the rich, tumultuous life of Gillian Mears. It explores Gillian’s inner world, artistic journey, and the complex experiences that shaped her writing.
Balancing Gillian’s Human Story with Literary Criticism
Gillian Mears 1987
Gillian Mears appeared to many to be a shy woman from Grafton, but her lived and imaginative lives were rich with adventure, risk and often transgressive passion. In her award-winning and acclaimed novels and short stories, she wrote fearlessly of the dark undercurrents of country and family life, always probing the depths and complexity of human desire.
Gillian’s sensuality and sexuality were the driving forces of her life and writing, and her personal and fictional worlds coalesce. As an adult, she was plagued by ill health, yet she remained steadfast in her quest to be independent and free.
Gillian Mears in 2015
Photographer: Anna Kucera
By her mid-forties, multiple sclerosis had confined Gillian to a wheelchair. Undaunted, she continued to write and publish until her death five years later in 2016.
How Gillian Curated Her Archive for a Future Biographer
Gillian Mears amassed an extensive collection of diaries, letters, manuscripts, photographs, recordings and ephemera, and deposited it with the Mitchell Library in Sydney. She was a prolific correspondent with significant figures of the cultural landscape including Gerald Murnane, David Malouf, Tim Winton, Elizabeth Jolley, Helen Garner, Drusilla Modjeska, Kate Grenville and Marr Grounds. This meticulous and moving biography reads Gillian’s life and work within Australia’s broader cultural community to celebrate her truly extraordinary achievements and adventures.
How Did You Avoid Crafting a Tome?
Leaping into Waterfalls is Bernadette Brennan’s second biography of a writer. Her first was an award-winning literary portrait of Helen Garner, which she discussed with Gabriella in Season One of Biographers in Conversation. As a literary biography, Leaping into Waterfalls is a critical reading of Gillian’s oeuvre.
Leaping into Waterfalls is a leap into the rocky waters of biography — into the life narrative of a brilliant, complicated writer within, through and beyond her writing.
The Role of a Biographer
Praise for Leaping into Waterfalls: The Enigmatic Gillian Mears
The blazing life, joy and dignity of novelist Gillian Mears. Bernadette Brennan’s biography shows a remarkable duty of care towards Mears the woman and the writer and should immediately plunge new readers into Mears’s unknowable sea.
Susan Johnson, Sydney Morning Herald
With Leaping into Waterfalls, Bernadette Brennan is confirmed as one of our finest biographers, to be celebrated not only for this vivid portrayal of a writing life, but for her facility with the art of biography in this complex, contemporary present.
Drusilla Modjeska, Inside Story
The biography is exceptional. In A Writing Life, Brennan identifies the biographer as a ‘literary portraitist – [who] interprets a life through her own imaginative, cultural and political filters’. This is necessarily the case, but Leaping into Waterfalls is more than a portrait; it is a mighty and populous canvas.
I recommend it to anyone with an interest in Australian literature.
Brenda Walker, Australian Book Review
What incredible research – adept archival work across Mears’ massive archive, plus 65 interviews! The dedication of a true professional shines through. I think Brennan managed to make her interviewees speak insightfully and quite freely, when in other biographies oral sources seem vague to me.
Leaping into Waterfalls: Essays and Interviews
Essay: ‘Romance and Reality’ by Bernadette Brennan.
Gillian Mears: Skinless and Brilliant. Interview with Phillip Adams, Late Night Live, ABC Radio National 30 September 2021.
‘Hand-to-hand combat: The porous and passionate life of Gillian Mears’, Review by Brenda Walker read as an ABR podcast.
A Wild Heart. Life Sentences Podcast with Caroline Baum. Listen where you get your podcasts. 29 October 2021.
The blazing life, joy and dignity of novelist Gillian Mears, Review by Susan Johnson, Sydney Morning Herald.
Dr Bernadette Brennan is a literary critic, academic and researcher in contemporary Australian writing. She is the author of a number of publications, including a monograph on Brian Castro and two edited collections: Just Words? Australian Authors Writing for Justice (UQP 2008), and Ethical Investigations: Essays on Australian Literature and Poetics (Vagabond 2008).
In 2017, she published her award-winning literary portrait A Writing Life: Helen Garner and Her Work (Text). She followed that biography with the award-winning Leaping into Waterfalls: The Enigmatic Gillian Mears (A&U 2021). Bernadette is currently working on a biography of Drusilla Modjeska.
To Learn More About Bernadette Brennan You’ll Find Her Here: