by Paul Genoni and Tanya Dalziell (An edited extract from Half the Perfect World: Writers, Dreamers and Drifters on Hydra, 1955-1964, Monash University Press 2018)
Whether it be Provence, Andalucía, or Tuscany, the desire for a life lived fully, simply and authentically in an ‘unspoilt’ Mediterranean pocket of an otherwise overly crowded world is ingrained in the contemporary western dream-scape and travel literature. This romantic impulse is driven by a yearning for a lifestyle cleansed of materialism and urban alienation, and replaced by long and glorious summers; seasonal abundance; rustic dishes to-die-for; centuries old pre-industrial traditions; and, ultimately, of being accepted as belonging by a cast of gruff, amusing, wise and rascally locals.
The worm that burrows deep into the bud of such longing is the reality of mass tourism. In an age when tour buses push ever further into distant corners of tranquility, and when cruise ships nose their way into successively remoter ports and bays, it is increasingly difficult to enjoy the sense of ‘belonging’ that separates the traveller from the tourist. This problem is not new and faced Charmian Clift when she reflected on her Hydra life in Peel Me a Lotus.
Clift’s account of Hydra in the winter of 1955-56 describes a low-key start to the expatriate colony that would gather in numbers as successive seasons passed. Five of the six ‘stayers’ for that first winter were Australian—Clift and Johnston; Sidney and Cynthia Nolan, and Nancy Dignan—and the Nolans and Dignan and her husband Irishman Patrick Greer, were there because they had followed the Johnstons. It is therefore feasible that Clift, Johnston and their children might have been the only foreigners on the island over the desolate months of winter. Having almost no Greek, it would have been an extraordinarily lonely experience for this prodigiously sociable couple.
Even in the early summer of 1956, as the family waited to see what the ‘season’ would bring, Clift remained focused on the small group of fellow expatriates with whom she and Johnston shared their swimming spot at Spilia.
It is a diverse and tantalizing collection of human beings sprawled about these rocks and ledges on a hot cliff far from their native lands, insurgents all who have rebelled against the station in which it pleased God to place them. What devious roads brought them to this small island, what decisions and indecisions, what driftings, what moments of desperation and hope? And what are they looking for? What do they expect to find here?
The rhetorical questions asked in that paragraph are telling. They are not questions one would ask of tourists, and they are revealing of Clift’s own “flickering conviction.” As someone who has decided not to come and go, as tourists do, but rather to come and stay, the questions remain to be answered: what is she looking for? What does she expect to find? How will she cope with “moments of desperation and hope?” Clift knows that it is not simply enough to have escaped from elsewhere. She and Johnston aren’t visitors in search of novelty and diversion, but rather they have chosen to settle and live here in search of ... something.
Tourists on the agora, Hydra (c1962)
One of the key narrative threads of Peel Me a Lotus emerges in Clift’s account of the tourist influx in the summer of 1956. That Hydra attracted summer tourists should not have surprised Clift--she and Johnston had settled on the island the previous August, at a high point of the tourist season. They had also travelled to several Greek islands including Hydra in May 1954 as Johnston collected material for The Cyprian Woman, a novel that conspicuously satirises the region’s reliance on tourism. For the novel’s hero, Stephen Colvin, the tourists are “whizzing through the place, catalogue in hand, as if it were the Chelsea flower show … Too hot, too tired, too bustled about, too organised. And so scared of missing one little thing that they end up by missing it all.” For Erica Kostandis, a guide for busloads of uncomprehending tourists, her clients are simply “petulant, ugly, thick-bodied sheep.”
But just as Kostandis needs the tourists she openly despises, so too Clift’s narrative in Peel Me a Lotus needs the transient island visitors to propel her themes of settlement and belonging. The tourists are the means by which Clift stakes out her claims to permanence and integration. She can differentiate herself from those who have come with motives of recreation or scenic diversion and arrive encumbered by touristic indifference. It is their presence that enables Clift to point out that there are categories and hierarchies of escapism, and that expatriation is a different experience from holiday-making or day-tripping.
US advertising for Greek tourism featuring Hydra, 1962
But just as Kostandis needs the tourists she openly despises, so too Clift’s narrative in Peel Me a Lotus needs the transient island visitors to propel her themes of settlement and belonging. The tourists are the means by which Clift stakes out her claims to permanence and integration. She can differentiate herself from those who have come with motives of recreation or scenic diversion and arrive encumbered by touristic indifference. It is their presence that enables Clift to point out that there are categories and hierarchies of escapism, and that expatriation is a different experience from holiday-making or day-tripping.
What are we doing here under the mad moon watching the promenade pass and repass—the linked girls, the complacent citizens, the gay tourists, the self-conscious artists, the groups of aristocrats come down from their lofty palaces to mingle with the village people? They all have their places. They belong. Why did we have to protest, burn our bridges, isolate ourselves, strip off our protective colouring as if it had been a decontamination suit? Why? Just to sit eternally and eternally around the plastic tablecloth playing verbal pitch and toss, baiting, being baited, being bored, drinking too much wine, becoming too angry or too tired to stop.
Once again Clift has asked, “What are we doing here?” as she contemplates a summer that provides both what she craves and what she fears. That passage also encapsulates Clift’s sensitivity to the expatriate’s dilemma of belongingness, where even the tourists can have more of a place, more of a reason to be on the island than those who have expatriated. Although buying a house, and having children in school, marked the Johnstons as ‘different’ from most foreigners, it is also the case that they have become hybrids of a sort—not a tourist and not a local; neither a temporary visitor nor guaranteed of permanence; neither a resource to be exploited nor someone who benefits. Clift is constantly reminded of the unsettling liminality that is the fate of expatriates who have an existential need to feel at home.
The authors, Dr. Paul Genoni and Prof. Tanya Dalziell are presenting a series of seminars, and writing workshops on Hydra 17-23 October, 2025 in a unique literary adventure for Writers, Readers, and Travellers. FIND OUT MORE about "An Island in the Mind"
YOU ARE WARMLY INVITED TO COME ALONG AND JOIN US FOR COFFEE
AND MEET THE AUTHORS IN PERTH on 23rd MARCH, 2025
Join us at The Bodhi Tree Book Cafe,
located cnr Oxford Street and Scarborough Beach Road, Mt Hawthorn,
anytime between 10 and 1 pm.
SHOULD YOU DECIDE TO ENROL FOR THIS RETREAT ON THE DAY YOU'LL SAVE Euro 150!
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