Behind the Masks: Gwen Harwood remembered by her friends

Surprising personal glimpses of the eminent and enigmatic Australian poet

‘I wonder sometimes if the literary pests are writing memoirs: “The last time I saw her she was pale and sick but smiling bravely.”’ So mused the dying Gwen Harwood in a letter written a few months before she succumbed to cancer. Nearly two decades have passed since she wrote that, but no memoir or biography of the loved and estimable poet has yet appeared. While her poems and the two published volumes of her correspondence enable us to hear her speaking about herself and her life, and people and things that mattered to her, in these pages her friends and acquaintances – no ‘literary pests’ these – tell for the first time about the Gwen Harwood they knew, woman and poet. Their recollections are warm and affectionate, and sometimes surprising. Some might even be thought shocking