March 12, 2025

Bernadette Brennan's "Leaping into Waterfalls: The Enigmatic Gillian Mears"

1 hour 4 minutes

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, a literary biography that explores the rich, tumultuous life of Gillian Mears, one of Australia’s most celebrated writers.

Here’s what you’ll discover in this episode:

Gillian Mears’s lived and imaginative lives were rich with adventure, risk and often transgressive passion. Her sensuality and sexuality were the driving forces of her life and writing, and her personal and fictional worlds coalesce

Why Bernadette Brennan chose the title, Leaping into Waterfalls

Why she explored the meaning of the metaphors in Gillian’s writing, suggesting what they reveal about Gillian’s character

How Bernadette took control of the narrative despite Gillian’s valiant attempts to curate her image through her annotated archives of 123 boxes of letters, diaries’ manuscripts and other traces of her life

How Bernadette retraced Gillian’s footsteps to create an authentic sense of place

How Bernadette balanced Gillian’s life story with literary criticism of her oeuvre

How Bernadette kept the focus on Gillian while also portraying the historical, social and cultural context of her times, which included prominent authors such as Helen Garner, Tim Winton and Kate Grenville

Ethical decisions about what evidence to include, emphasise and suppress given that Gillian’s sensuality and sexuality were at the core of her identity and informed her writing.

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By Gabriella

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