On 6 August 2023 my colleague, mentor and friend Elizabeth Webby AM, Emeritus Professor of Australian Literature at the University of Sydney, died after a long illness.

Elizabeth was a no-nonsense person, neither squeamish nor prone to euphemism. In that spirit I opt for the direct, plain-spoken language of “dying” and “death” rather than softer terms like “passed” or “departed”. News of Elizabeth’s death spread swiftly through Australia’s literary and scholarly networks. Tributes soon appeared in print and online, testifying to the vast intellectual contribution Elizabeth had made, as scholar, teacher, professor and colleague, to Australian literary studies and Australian writing. What these tributes reveal is the breadth and depth of her impact on the field itself. They also encourage further reflection on her role in nurturing Australian literature and its study during a time of significant cultural change. Elizabeth’s impact, however, was not just on the field as a kind of abstraction but also on the lives of its people: on a full range of undergraduate, honours and postgraduate students; on academic colleagues and scholars at all levels in Australia and abroad; on members of the broader Australian literary community, from journalists and librarians to those working in arts organisations; and on a wide range of Australian writers.

As often happens at life’s end, Elizabeth’s story took shape through the collective voices of family, friends and colleagues who came together for her funeral. In Elizabeth’s case, aspects of her story were formulated in 2007 when she retired from the University of Sydney’s Chair of Australian Literature, a milestone marked by an Association for the Study of Australian Literature (ASAL) conference and subsequent publications in her honour. In death, however, disparate communities coincide, and public and private narratives mingle in new ways. For her colleagues and students, the eulogies presented by her children Rosalind and Richard gave glimpses of Elizabeth’s childhood, marriage and family life. Those who had not heard it before were struck by the story of her father, RAAF navigator George Loder, who died in World War 2 without ever meeting his little daughter, and the Distinguished Flying Cross medal that three-year-old Elizabeth received on his behalf from the then Governor-General, the Duke of Gloucester, in 1945. This poignant story, and associated photographs, made the newspapers at the time.

Much has been said and written already about Elizabeth. But there’s reason to reflect — as I do in this part-obituary, part memoir of a woman and the discipline she professed — on the world she helped cultivate, a world I inhabited for a good part of my working life. It also seems timely to dwell for a moment on what was distinctive about her way of navigating academia. The scholarly and personal values she modelled are those to which many aspire but that remain elusive in practice. It has ever been thus. But it seems especially so in the contemporary, corporately managed, entrepreneurial university. I’m referring to such values as collegiality, generosity and reciprocity, which cut against the grain of systems in which academics find themselves enmeshed, systems that audit, drive and manage university workplaces and that seem to privilege individualism and competitive rivalry. Is there a connecting thread between the values I have in mind and the story of the child who collected her dead father’s medal? Is it too much to suppose that someone’s luminous professional career, replete with honour and significant achievement, was in some deep sense conditioned by this formative event — an event that tells of the fragility of life, reminding us of mortality?

I will return to this question. In what follows, my personal memories of Elizabeth and my claims about her legacy implicate the study of Australian literature as a field in flux within Australia’s wider academic humanities. For clarity’s sake, then, I situate myself here not only as a (recently retired) white, middle-class, settler-Australian academic but also in relation to times and places that form my angle of view. After undergraduate studies in the 1970s, an interval as a secondary English teacher and several years childrearing, I returned in the 1990s to Macquarie University to undertake a doctorate. In between, through the 1980s, new paradigms associated with feminism, poststructuralism and cultural studies had arrived in Australian universities. By the 1990s, these intellectual movements were challenging and, in some cases, disrupting literary studies. I observed this up close as a student in Macquarie University’s English Department. That Department split in 1996 when a breakaway Cultural Studies group formed its own Department. Postgraduate students were caught between warring camps, with supervisors, mentors and even casual tutoring jobs on either side of a bitter divide. Elizabeth herself, as I learned from her later, was brought in, together with others, by the Head of School to review the department amid this crisis.

My doctorate bears the hallmarks of this time. Meanwhile, as Hannah Forsyth and others have documented, the postwar boom time for universities was over and jobs in the humanities were declining. The contours of Australian literary studies, let alone Australian literature per se, only really became visible to me as I neared the end of my doctorate, when I had to choose whether to pursue an academic career, and if so, on what track. What ensued, in my case, was a back-and-forth movement between Australian literary studies and the multidisciplinary field of Australian studies. This movement was enriching but at times frustrating and it probably shaped my sense of being at once inside and outside several fields.

From where I stood Elizabeth’s knowledge of Australian literature seemed encyclopedic, and her contribution to the field immense. Yet this is a simplistic and reifying view. Both Australian literature and Australian literary studies — like the humanities more generally — have altered in subtle and obvious ways, in a process that started long before and that has continued after my own brief time in the job. I should here insert another important caveat about what follows, drawing on Leigh Dale’s The Enchantment of English, which warns of any too easy conflation of Sydney’s Chair of Australian Literature with the field at large: “the weight of Sydney as an institution means that this position is too often made homologous for the field as a whole, and indeed is regarded as the marker of the health of writing and publishing” (2012:207). Dale’s account of the establishment of the Sydney Chair points to the ideological and disciplinary orientation of Elizabeth’s two predecessors, GA (Gerry) Wilkes and Leonie Kramer. This in turn prompts my own question about the ways in which their respective attitudes towards professing Australian literature may have been like or unlike Elizabeth’s. One difference lay in Elizabeth’s more exclusive focus on the subject and the consequent breadth and strength of her command. Another has to do with comportment. While a Chair can endow its occupants with an aura of remote monumentality, Elizabeth — though perfectly capable of gravitas and monumentality when required — was someone I’d describe as grounded and approachable, a person happy in the quotidian, alongside others. My ensuing reflections on Elizabeth Webby, in such ways and as a person — from which her role as Chair and impact on the field are inseparable — must be partial and provisional, sometimes untidy, and shaped by personal recollection, feeling and the bonds of friendship. I am also, I should add, indebted to the observations of colleagues — both at Sydney and in Australian literary networks and communities at large — who knew and worked with Elizabeth in various contexts and for longer periods.

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In a valediction occasioned by her retirement and published in the Autumn 2007 issue of SAM, Sydney’s alumni magazine, Geordie Williamson wrote: “Elizabeth Webby’s contribution to the field of Australian literary studies has been of such long standing, intellectual rigour and scholarly range that it is almost impossible to extricate her story from that of the discipline: throughout a career spent as teacher, researcher, editor and author, individual and subject have all but fused together” (2007b:15). Williamson here calls Australian literary studies a “discipline”. It’s arguably more accurately identified as a field that sits within the discipline of “literary studies” from which its analytical and research methods derive. That said, I like to think of Australian literary studies as a kind of “world”, albeit a world among other worlds, with its changing communities gathering and regathering around textual objects that themselves shift and transform with cultural and social change. Elizabeth, whose research career began in the early 1960s, was of a generation of scholars who advocated for and professionalised the study of Australian literature in universities at a key time in the nation’s postwar development. For Robert Dixon, who was Elizabeth’s first doctoral completion as well as her successor as Sydney’s fourth (and, for the foreseeable future, last) Chair of Australian Literature, Elizabeth’s generation pursued identifiable, field-building tasks: “establishing and critically justifying a national canon; building up basic scholarly resources such as bibliographies and histories of the national literature; producing reliable editions of canonical texts; and publishing biographical and critical studies of Australian authors” (cited by Williamson in his story, “Dixon the Defender”, in the same issue of SAM).

If such field-building scholarship seems merely provincial or nationalist, I’d argue (as does Dixon elsewhere) that, for Elizabeth and her peers, Australian literary studies were neither static nor closed, but genuinely open to interdisciplinary perspectives, and inherently worldly and transnational. Australian literature has always borne a complex relation to worlds within and outside the settler nation. From the beginning of her research, Elizabeth likewise looked outward to other literatures and fields — indeed she contributed to literary studies in Aotearoa/New Zealand, with work on Janet Frame, Katherine Mansfield and others. As correspondence held in her papers in the Mitchell Library amply demonstrates, Elizabeth cultivated the study of Australian literature abroad through her connections with scholars of Australian literature based in Canada, Aotearoa/New Zealand, Europe, the US, Korea and China. Professor Labao Wang, who teaches and researches Australian literature at Shanghai International Studies University, and whose PhD was supervised by Elizabeth, wrote in an email to the Webby family that “her name and scholarship are known to several generations of scholars and students who have received her support in the teaching and research of Australian literary studies in China”, adding that social media networks (such as WeChat) were “flooded with Chinese expressions of sadness about her departure”. Elizabeth’s profession of Australian literature was in no way insular, but modelled openness to wider contexts and new developments, texts and perspectives.

Elizabeth’s training and career unfolded entirely at the University of Sydney. She graduated with her BA in 1963, with an Honours dissertation on then mid-career author Patrick White from which she published an article in 1962 on his play The Ham Funeral. She completed her Masters thesis on the works of Henry Handel Richardson within two years, graduating in 1966. Her doctorate, completed by 1972, was a massive archival undertaking that generated knowledge about literary culture in the Australian colonies before 1850. Elizabeth’s first book, Early Australian Poetry, published in 1982, was a remarkable bibliographic resource deriving from this research. The subsequent publications generated from this research, over many decades, grounded her authority across both canonical and emerging writers and all major periods in the field. She was both an expert on nineteenth-century colonial poetry and thoroughly conversant with the work of major and emerging contemporary poets, novelists and dramatists. Her knowledge of Australian literature ranged across genres, forms and modes, book history, popular culture and theatre. Elizabeth either led or worked collaboratively with others on projects that built the infrastructure for ongoing research across these multiple subfields. The last instance of this long career of collaborative work is the 2021 book Elizabeth co-edited with Anna Johnston, Eliza Hamilton Dunlop: Writing from the Colonial Frontier. The project completed a long arc: it was Elizabeth who had unearthed Dunlop’s poetry in her 1960s doctoral research.

Elizabeth knew how to wield professorial authority. She held and expressed robust views. She was a loyal defender of her own protegees; it would be surprising if she did not make one or two enemies in her time, although she herself was not one to harbour grudges. She managed the demands of professional academic life with efficiency and acumen. Susan Lever recalls in her obituary for the Sydney Morning Herald, for instance, the exemplary advice Elizabeth once gave her about how to succeed in committee work: read the agenda papers in advance as the likelihood is that others in attendance won’t have done so. Indeed Elizabeth’s administrative acumen was valued by the university: she served as Faculty Sub- or Pro-Dean several times. Many sought to benefit from her honest, direct and practical wisdom. Elizabeth’s warmth and wit, together with her humanity and evident moral compass, inspired trust. Tributes have repeatedly identified both her dedication and the pleasure she took in her work. She is remembered with admiration and gratitude for the way she would always show up to talks, seminars, conferences, book launches and readings in support of scholars and writers. She persisted in showing up even in more recent times when her mobility was beginning to be compromised. In her tribute on behalf of ASAL, the association that Elizabeth helped found and that she served and supported for many decades, Julieanne Lamond wrote: “As a scholar, mentor, teacher, and advocate [Elizabeth] was extraordinary, and her generosity has shaped the field in lasting ways.”

Elizabeth’s way of professing Australian literature was undoubtedly a function of her personality but also conditioned by conflicting views embodied in the Chair and its history. Established in 1962, the Chair was funded in large part by the university via the internal deployment of a senior salary. But funds were also raised through a high-profile, public campaign (1956-1957) to which both key individuals and organisations contributed. Documenting the progress of this public fund, Geraldine Barnes describes it as one of “the more fascinating money-raising and public relations undertakings in Australian university history” (2001:127). A broader national interest has therefore always been inherent to the Chair, but not without contradiction. Some argued, as Dale puts it, that it carried “a responsibility to nurture local forms of cultural production” even though “this was not the view that held sway within the university” (2012:210–11). If Elizabeth’s approach to literary scholarship was formed by Sydney’s Oxford-style training, her approach to her work as Chair was profoundly and energetically public spirited in terms surely unmatched before or since. She not only served the scholarly, academic community but was tireless in her support of Australian writers and writing at large.

How on earth did she manage to balance the rigorous duties of academic research and teaching with the seemingly limitless demands of her public role as Chair? Perhaps Elizabeth’s generation of scholars was less tightly bound to performance indicators and metrics, less harried by the pressure to pursue difficult-to-secure grants, to publish in prestigious offshore journals and/or generate sole-authored books in overly rapid succession. Elizabeth produced several sole-authored books but invested most of her intellect, energy and time in a vast array of other projects and “outputs” that were aimed at collective capacity building. It is abundantly evident that Elizabeth’s scholarly endeavours, her research projects over many years, her countless publications arising (authored solely and collaboratively), more than equalled the value and reach of the individual monograph. Elizabeth’s involvement on numerous, wide-ranging (often Australian Research Council-funded) projects involving smaller and larger teams helped create the infrastructure from which scholars benefit today.

Elizabeth did a great deal of important scholarly work. But her generation, as suggested earlier, also enjoyed a degree of institutional freedom to take on time-consuming tasks less directly beneficial for a university career. Such tasks as editing literary journals were a vital support for writers of Australian literature. Among many other roles, Elizabeth edited Southerly, Australia’s oldest literary journal, for eleven years (1988–1999) through a key period of cultural change. Editing Southerly enabled her to nurture and publish the early work of many new and increasingly diverse writers. Elizabeth’s support for writers also included her roles on numerous non-academic literary committees, such as Patron and Chair of the NSW Writers’ Centre, and her work as committee member, judge or consultant on a variety of projects at the request of agencies like the NSW Ministry of the Arts. There was also her unstinting service in judging both scholarly and literary prizes, notably the Miles Franklin Literary Award (1999–2004). For at least a decade, on and off, she chaired the judging of the NSW State Library’s Nita B Kibble Awards for women’s life writing (1992–96; 2005–07; 2014–2018). It was Elizabeth, furthermore, who helped to define the Kibble Awards on the basis of life-writing by women. Encompassing fictional and non-fictional works, “life-writing” was elastic enough to yield a large number of eligible entries each year. In short, Elizabeth’s phenomenal activity as mentor, supporter, interlocutor and public advocate for Australian writers thoroughly justified the Order of Australia (AM) she received, in 2004, for “service to the study, teaching and promotion of Australian literature, for support to Australian authors, and for fostering links between the academic and general reading communities”.

As her long and formative involvement in the Nita B Kibble Awards suggests, Elizabeth directed her efforts especially (though not exclusively) towards women — women students, women who crossed her path as early career researchers, and women writers. Elizabeth’s own career began at a time when universities, and English departments, were male dominated, especially at senior levels, and pathways for women were narrow. Women who achieved professorial positions bore the reputation of being even more fervent gatekeepers than their male counterparts. Some senior academic women, legend has it, imparted the view to junior colleagues that “I did it tough, and so should you”. The choices Elizabeth made, from the outset of her career, however, were unusual, and exhibited her personal agency and independence in terms that I think aligned with feminism. As Margaret Harris records in the obituary she wrote for the Australian Academy of Humanities, Elizabeth did not take the expected academic route. Though she could have undertaken a traditional “English Lit” doctoral dissertation at a prestigious British university, she chose instead to pursue a PhD in Australian literature at the University of Sydney. I am sure that this was at once a practical, personal choice and, arguably and perhaps counterintuitively, a feminist one insofar as it allowed her to balance family life and academic career.

Whether she’d have chosen to label herself feminist or not, Elizabeth was swift to recognise and allow for the challenges women faced in navigating the patriarchal ways of the university. There are many stories from women — students, colleagues and writers — about Elizabeth’s support and encouragement. Susan Lever makes mention, in her obituary, of Elizabeth’s recognition of the particular challenges associated with combining motherhood and career. Likewise Katie Hansord writes movingly in her tribute of the encouragement Elizabeth gave her at a difficult time. And in a personal communication, Anna Johnston has observed how, during their work together on Eliza Hamilton Dunlop, Elizabeth offered “unwavering support and appreciation for [her] own insanely busy schedule as a working-mother-academic”, making her “feel so seen and understood”. Elizabeth was not a gatekeeper. She kept the door open for women, at all levels of their studying or working lives.

Elizabeth’s support for women was mirrored in her intellectual endeavours, especially from the 1980s onwards. In the years leading up to the Bicentenary, her correspondence shows her active involvement in various projects about Australian women writers. One such project was led by prominent feminist the late Dale Spender and involved, along with others, the writer Debra Adelaide, whose doctorate was supervised by Elizabeth. This project aimed at recovering and disseminating Australian women’s writing, past and present. Elizabeth’s position and standing no doubt added great value, but she was also an engaged contributor. In long and detailed correspondence with Spender, Elizabeth suggested works for the “Australian Women Writers: The Literary Heritage” series, to be published by Pandora Press, of which Spender was founding editor. The series sought — in terms akin to work by Virago Press — to bring to light the novels of a forgotten generation of women writers: Ada Cambridge, Catherine Martin, Rosa Praed and Tasma (Jessie Couvreur). Elizabeth helped with the identification and commissioning of women scholars to write introductions for the various works in this series. Elizabeth wrote the introduction for Martin’s An Australian Girl, one of many introductions she produced across her career for a great range of publications.

Along with her support for women’s writing, Elizabeth was increasingly conscious of other voices typically relegated to the margins of both Australian literature and its study. Her advocacy for such groups can be glimpsed in her 1983 review essay surveying the Australian short story in which, displaying her characteristic humour, she makes withering use of the acronym WACM (White Anglo Celtic Male) to refer to what was then a mostly white and male literary publishing economy. Elizabeth then proceeds to highlight voices from non-Anglo communities, drawing attention to such writers as Anna Couani, Angelo Loukakis, Ania Walwicz and Spiro Zavos.

Apart from a chapter on Jack Davis in the 1993 edition of Modern Australian Plays, her book for senior secondary and undergraduate students, Elizabeth’s own research did not usually focus on literature authored by Australian First Nations peoples. It is important to note, however, that Elizabeth’s occupation of the Chair coincided with what has been called the post-Mabo period in Australian literary culture. As Chair, and through her long-term involvement with ASAL, Elizabeth lent support to writers and scholars in the sphere of Indigenous writing, which from at least the 1980s onward had emerged as a vitally important field of literary endeavour, sometimes within, adjacent to or at critical odds with the field of “Australian Literature”. Recent Indigenous writing and scholarship — notably work by Jeanine Leane, among others — have laid bare assumptions underpinning both settler Australian literature and its study — assumptions about colonial history and its legacy, and about legitimacy and belonging.

I have a small but telling example of ways in which Elizabeth offered support. As a postgraduate, I attended my first ASAL conference in 1996 at the Queensland University of Technology (QUT). I was bunked in student accommodation with an Honours student from the University of Adelaide named Sonja Kurtzer, who, I was saddened to learn recently, died in 2018. We shared the somewhat unusual situation, compared to most of our student peers, of being the mothers of young children. But Sonja was a single parent and an Aboriginal woman. A contributor’s note in a subsequent publication identifies her as a woman of Kokatha/Mirning descent from the far west coast of South Australia. Sonja was understandably nervous, and not just as an Honours student among postgraduates. I am now struck by the courage it must have taken for her, alone and far from kin and community, to attend an ASAL conference, let alone to address a bunch of white settler academics. Her paper, on Glenys Ward’s Stolen Generations testimonial memoir, The Wandering Girl, unpacked the discursive and cultural constructs of “authenticity” through which Aboriginal writers perforce presented their stories to non-Indigenous readers. She received a warm response from those gathered. But I mostly recall Elizabeth approaching Sonja afterwards, with an invitation to submit her essay to Southerly. Sonja’s paper — “Wandering Girl: Who Defines ‘Authenticity’ in Aboriginal Literature?” — appeared in the January 1998 issue. It was subsequently reprinted in Michele Grossman’s edited collection Blacklines: Contemporary Critical Writings by Indigenous Australians and has been widely cited. To read Sonja’s essay today is to marvel at her anticipation of interventions by today’s leading First Nations scholars and writers who, among other things, are working to unsettle the terms and boundaries of Australian literature and its study. Elizabeth’s support for Aboriginal writers in this period occurred in similarly sidelong yet materially effective ways. Her papers for the 1988 ASAL conference include correspondence with key writers in the field of Indigenous literature at this time. Elizabeth also actively encouraged the teaching of Indigenous texts at the University of Sydney and supported the development of influential scholarship on Aboriginal literature, in particular the work of her colleague, the late Penny Van Toorn.

Elizabeth’s sensitivity to the violence of colonisation is a theme that emerges early and appears as a continuous thread in her work on settler colonial literature, past and present. The thread begins with her doctoral work, and her discovery of Eliza Hamilton Dunlop’s 1838 poem “The Aboriginal Mother”, which laments and protests the Myall Creek massacre. Her paper at the inaugural ASAL conference (1978), “The Aboriginal in Early Australian Literature” (later published in Southerly), returns to Dunlop’s poem along with many other texts, examining their representations of Aboriginal peoples through such Euro-colonial frames as contemptuous caricature and “the noble savage”, or as passive victims of colonial oppression. The thread continues in her 2014 essay on Charles Harpur’s representations of the bush, which also occasioned her reflection on Kate Grenville’s The Secret River, a settler-literary pairing focused on the Dyarubbin (Hawkesbury–Nepean) River region. Elizabeth compares Grenville’s novel with the Sydney Theatre Company’s 2013 adaptation, concluding that the presence and voices of Aboriginal actors made the latter the more powerful of the two versions. In between these moments comes my personal favourite, Elizabeth’s 1994 essay “The Grave in the Bush”. Here she identifies how the recurring trope of the grave in settler-colonial texts serves to inscribe belonging and legitimacy, and how the grave works as a symbolic terra nullius that erases Aboriginal ownership. Elizabeth concludes her 1994 essay as follows: “The facts of Aboriginal ownership of Australia and subsequent dispossession have been recognised by the Mabo judgment. We are yet to see how far white Australians will be prepared to rewrite and reread their own myths and narratives. Quite a few of our national monuments may have to be pulled down; quite a few hallowed spots desecrated before reconciliation of black and white is possible” (1994:38). These prescient comments still reverberate, given the 2023 Voice referendum result which she did not live to see.

I cannot presume to say how Elizabeth felt upon witnessing, after her retirement, the decline of the Australian Literature Program at the University of Sydney, a program she had shaped, taught and led for many years. Contraction in this program must be seen in the context of challenges, nationally and internationally, for both English studies and the humanities generally. The departures, retirements and deaths of Australian literature staff did not result in new hires, and the capacity of the program was inexorably whittled down. There were, as is often the case in such circumstances, multiple factors at work. But the program’s death knell was the university’s new curriculum, a centrally mandated degree structure that made it impossible to sustain an Aust Lit major. A similar fate has befallen other specialist areas in English at Sydney too, as at other universities, though appointments have been made in areas attractive to students. One such area of growth in undergraduate English, in Sydney as elsewhere, is Creative Writing. Staff in this program produce Australian literature and encourage their students to read as well as write it. A dynamic relation has long existed between Australian literary studies and creative writing. Elizabeth herself, as Chair at Sydney, fostered this connection not only in her leadership of teaching programs but in her supervision of brilliant future writers, her tireless support for and contribution to Australian literary and arts organisations, her continuous, expert judging of literary prizes and her editorial work.

Following Robert Dixon’s retirement in 2018, the University of Sydney effectively abandoned its Chair of Australian Literature despite concerted protest from the literary community. Though long retired, Elizabeth took what action she could by signing a petition from key scholars around Australia addressed to the university’s Chancellor, Vice-Chancellor and Senate. I also hold a copy of the letter she wrote to the Australian Academy of Humanities requesting its statement in support of the Chair’s continuation. As Chair of Department at this time, a role with virtually no executive power, I worked with both the department and my Head of School on a strategic plan. At this juncture, I sought Elizabeth’s advice. Should the department present the faculty with a request for a reconfigured and renamed Chair, or ask for the appointment of a lecturer in Australian literature? We knew only one of these two options would be countenanced. She reflected carefully. Her advice, to seek the appointment of a lecturer rather than a Chair, says much about her practical wisdom, and perhaps her realism about university management. It also speaks, however, to her belief in the importance of teaching, and her openness to the future implied in the prospect of an early career scholar who could carry Australian literature into the classroom. Several years later, with the support of a generous bequest, the John Rowe Lectureship in Australian Literature was established, the position advertised, and Dr Meg Brayshaw appointed.

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It is fitting that my first memory of Elizabeth stems from a one-day symposium on Christina Stead convened at the State Library of NSW in 1993 to mark the ten years since Stead’s death and the arrival of Hazel Rowley’s biography. I had only just begun my doctoral study of Stead and was there to listen and learn. Elizabeth’s talk was on Stead’s brilliant cycle of short stories, The Salzburg Tales (1934). Among these stories is “Day of Wrath”, a tale told by a school boy to an audience of pilgrims at the Salzburg Festival. Visiting the searing memory of the 1927 wreck of the Greycliffe ferry in Sydney Harbour, the tale conveys the claustrophobia of the colonial province. Before I wrote this piece, I was convinced that Elizabeth herself had read the story aloud to us. But evidence from Elizabeth’s papers and from collective memory suggest otherwise: the story was read out by the actor Robyn Nevin, and Elizabeth gave her paper on the Tales immediately afterwards. This lodged in my memory as a double or fused image: one part is the story’s final image of Viola, the drowned girl ostracised by the village gossips, whose foot, caught in a rope, had tethered her to the ferry: “a watermaiden tangled in a lily-root, and not able to reach the surface”. The other part is of a very still and poised Elizabeth, reading at the lectern: an image-memory that remained with me long after the other wonderful scholarly talks had faded away.

In about 1997 I received a kindly handwritten letter in reply to an essay I had submitted to Southerly, of which Elizabeth was then editor. I can still visualise the tiny, almost illegible handwriting that conveyed her encouragement. Over the years and especially after her retirement, as she travelled with her husband Barry in Australia and overseas, she regularly sent me beautiful handwritten postcards, that I treasured, in that same tiny script. Amid the pandemic, not long after my own father died, in early 2022, I learned that Elizabeth’s condition had deteriorated and that she was now in the nursing home where, a year or so later, she died. On my first visit there, still fresh from my own loss, I took her hands in mine for the first time in our years of friendship. I couldn’t help but exclaim, laughing through my tears, how tiny and dainty her hands were.

In her 1965 Southerly essay “The Fortunes of Richard Mahony: Dream and Nightmare”, Elizabeth draws attention to Mahony’s flight from confinement, change, decay and death, reasoning that it’s the very thing that precipitates his terrible end. She argues he disregards or disavows material things, is impractical about money and, more significantly, enacts a dualistic denial of mortality and the physical body in pursuit of an ill-defined intellectual or spiritual goal. In other words, “his struggle is not only against external forces but against himself”: “His dilemma is that of a person who, while longing for life, cannot enjoy life because of the constant reminders of its transitoriness. His search for the secrets of life is hampered by his refusal to recognise the only too evident fact of death, by his rejection of the fate which he, like all of us, cannot escape” (1965:254). His descent into madness equates to live burial, recalling the fate that befalls the diggers in the first volume’s “Proem” who are buried in the earth. Mahony’s decay of the mind and the self, preceding the decay of his body, is the worst kind of death.

But this was not to be Elizabeth’s fate. Her mind remained alert and active even as her body succumbed to an immobilising illness. In her last months, Elizabeth seemed to drift and dream through her days. I believe she passed the time, at least on her good days, remembering. She seemed remote from the present world, though she did like hearing news of her friends and colleagues in Australian literature. And when I last visited her in May 2023, astonishingly, she told me she’d been reading and enjoying Alexis Wright’s Praiseworthy on her Kindle. This was the latest of several works of Australian fiction she’d accessed on her Kindle in the last year of her life. The literature of Australia continued, even at this most difficult time, to bring interest and pleasure.

One last memory, one that I can’t pin down to a definitive time or place. Perhaps it was while sitting with her at a Belvoir Street Theatre play, or an ASAL conference dinner. All I know is that as I watched her searching for something, in her wallet or purse, I caught a glimpse of a strange little ornament: a tiny white skull. Curious, I asked her about it. She replied that it was her memento mori, the reminder of mortality that she always carried with her.

Memento mori tells, in the midst of life, of the inexorable approach of that far, or near, horizon. It offers its quiet corrective to the jostling, frenetic, busy world, to the endless, restless striving for the next thing. For me, this has nothing to do with melancholia or morbidity. Rather, memento mori guides and informs a sense of perspective. This was apparent in Elizabeth’s wisdom and kindness as well as in the joy she derived from books, plays, poems and literary events, and from her interactions with others. She showed how one could engage passionately and devotedly with this world, even worlds pervaded by systems, yet remain grounded and true. What she taught us — what she taught me at least — is that the pleasure one takes from life and work may be continuous with small acts of remembering: remembering the limits of the striving ego, remembering our dependence on community, and on our own bodies. Remembering our shared mortality.

I thank staff at the Mitchell Library, State Library of NSW, for their assistance in accessing the Elizabeth Webby Papers. For their comments on drafts of this paper, and for their encouragement, I thank Debra Adelaide, Leigh Dale, Margaret Harris, Gail Jones, Peter Kirkpatrick, Susan Lever, Fiona Morrison, Monique Rooney, Gillian Russell, Susan Sheridan, Richard Webby and Rosalind Webby. For kind permission to quote from their personal email communications, I thank Labao Wang and Anna Johnston. I am grateful to the Kurtzer family — Sonja’s daughter Ellen Bertani, Sonja’s mother and her brother — for their kind permission to tell Sonja Kurtzer’s story, and I also thank Margaret Allen and Natalie Harkin for enabling my contact with the family.

Works Cited

Barnes, G 2001, “Funding the Chair of Australian Literature: A Brief History of the Public Record”, in L Jobling and C Runcie (eds), Matters of the Mind: Poems, Essays and Interviews in Honour of Leonie Kramer, University of Sydney.

Dale, L 2012, The Enchantment of English: Professing English Literatures in Australian Universities, Sydney University Press.

Dixon, R 2007, “Time to Reconnect the National Literature to World Contexts”, Sydney Pen: The Quarterly, no. 127 (May), pp. 4–5.

Forsyth, H 2014, A History of the Modern Australian University, UNSW: NewSouth Publishing, Sydney.

Grossman, M 2003, Blacklines: Contemporary Critical Writings by Indigenous Australians, Melbourne University Publishing. ProQuest Ebook Central, https://ebookcentral-proquest-com.ezproxy.library.sydney.edu.au/lib/usyd/detail.action?docID=5628344.

Hansord, K 2023, “Vale Elizabeth Webby”, Mascara Literary Review, 10 August, https://www.mascarareview.com/vale-elizabeth-webby/.

Harris, M 2023, “Elizabeth Webby AM FAHA 1942–2023”, Australian Academy of the Humanities website, https://humanities.org.au/wp-content/uploads/2023/09/Obituary-Elizabeth-Webby-1942-2023-1.pdf

Johnston, A and Webby E (eds) 2021, Eliza Hamilton Dunlop: Writing from the Colonial Frontier, Sydney University Press.

Kurtzer, S 1998, “Wandering Girl: Who Defines ‘Authenticity’ in Aboriginal Literature?”, Southerly, vol. 58, no. 2, pp. 20–29.

Lamond, J 2023, “Vale Elizabeth Webby”. Association for the Study of Australian Literature (ASAL). 8 August. Online. https://www.asal.org.au/news/vale-elizabeth-webby/

Leane, J 2010, “The Whiteman’s Aborigine”, PhD Thesis, University of Technology, Sydney.

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