Nancy Phelan; Australian writer who travelled the world (great)
Hyfler/Rosner
Nancy Phelan
Australian writer who travelled the world
Christopher Hawtree
Tuesday February 19, 2008
The Guardian
Nancy Phelan, who has died aged 94, had an early ambition to
sing - until an outlandish Irish-Australian aunt, Louise
Mack said: "Why do you want to be one of those boring
singers screaming arias? You go now and write me a story! Go
on! Go and start work at once, you lazy little beast,
loafing down on the beach all day!" So, after a European
sojourn, including a stay in wartime Devon, Phelan produced
numerous bestselling books on yoga, unusual travel memoirs,
novels and cookbooks, a delightful account of an eccentric,
sunlit Sydney upbringing and a biography, in 1987, of her
cousin, conductor Sir Charles Mackerras.
She was the daughter of a lawyer, William Creagh, who was
more interested in books, carpentry and sailing. This was an
unusual family. As Phelan wrote in A Kingdom by the Sea
(1969), an early memoir, "it was into the shark-infested sea
that my father dropped us as infants, while my mother wailed
on the sands." Her sociable family home was on Sydney's
north shore, where door hinges were used as nutcrackers and
her father's mousetraps made Heath Robinson look minimalist.
"Sea shanties were sung as hymns might be in a more devout
household," while dinnertime talk of Voltaire, Roman law,
Cicero and Dickens provided better education than her
school's.
After absconding to Melbourne to seek a Melba singing
scholarship at a music college, it was then that she was
encouraged to write by Aunt Louise, an adventurous woman who
had known Katherine Mansfield. Her first paid writing work -
a radio serial - financed a trip to London in 1938. There
she worked in a Bloomsbury cafe hoping to glimpse Virginia
Woolf, but it was not to be. These memories were evoked in
an exhilarating book, The Swift Foot of Time (1983). She
then toured the Midlands to hawk Pears soap in department
stores, partly by denigrating Palmolive as perilously oily:
"West Bromwich was full of bad skins and most of them
congregated daily in our shop." She also recognised that
"good nature, stubborn courage and humour seemed to run
through the British poor".
Soon after meeting Raymond Phelan (known as Pete), an
Englishman, they married, honeymooning in Britanny weeks
before the outbreak of the second world war. He went to
fight with the navy in the Pacific, while she and her infant
daughter Vanessa went to a north Devon farm belonging to a
near extinct landowning family: life there forms one of the
funniest, even shocking, accounts of wartime England: Nelly
the cook plunges a hand ("the Auvergne manner") into a
slaughtered pig's neck to get the full quota of blood for
use elsewhere.
As the war ended, Phelan spent six months in a Chelsea
hospital suffering from nephritis. After her recovery, she
did picture research for the political historian GDH Cole,
who jocularly remarked: "You couldn't get anything worse
than an Irish-Australian."
Following the death of her brother, John, she returned to
Australia with her family to pay a brief visit to her
grief-stricken mother. This, however, became an extended
stay and Sydney remained her lifelong base. Numerous writers
and artists became friends, and from 1950 to 1956 she
frequently journeyed from island to island with the South
Pacific Commission's social development section.
Along with such minor novels as The River and the Brook
(1962), there came numerous, far quirkier travel books:
jottings on napkins or her own skin fuelled Atoll Holiday
(1959) about the Gilbert Islands, not usually visited by
tourists. There was a pioneering tour of Turkey (Welcome the
Wayfarer, 1965), and then a trip around Australia for Some
Came Early, Some Came Late (1971), in which she wrote of
many immigrant populations, including a surprisingly large
one from Estonia. Her travels to Japan provided the material
for Pillow of Grass (1969), in which she reaches Nagasaki's
"bleak, scruffy, sterile" Peace Park.
She was very keen on yoga, and her eight books on the
subject include Yoga Over Forty and Sex and Yoga; good
breathing stood her in fine stead, as did a Blue Mountains
retreat where she and Pete built a modest tower for work and
convivial gatherings, enjoyed by everybody from Patrick
White to Jill Neville. Such talk - glimpsed in a book of
sketches called Writing Round the Edges (2003) - animated
her letters, whose publication would more than match the
brio of her aunt who had first inspired the teenage Phelan
to write.
She is survived by her daughter.
· Nancy Phelan, writer, born August 2 1913; died January 11
2008
marilyn...@aol.com
La N
<marilyn...@aol.com> wrote in message
news:2995927d-bd45-4733...@e25g2000prg.googlegroups.com...
> lovely -- everyone needs an aunt like that!
>
Agreed. What a wonderful obit.
- nilita