‘Human, erring, condonable’

The death of Gabrielle Carey in May 2023 was a cruel loss for the Australian literary world, especially its Joyce community. I first met Gabrielle shortly after moving to Sydney from London in 2010. She invited me to her annual Bloomsday celebration, which took place in a Glebe pub. I was new in town and delighted to join the readings and revelry. I suspected, rightly, that my Dublin accent would glean me some credibility, if nothing else did.

Gabrielle’s interest in Joyce was deep and enduring, and part of her broader affinity with Ireland, where she had lived for a spell. But that was only one facet of her open and intensely enquiring nature. She had accidentally achieved literary celebrity in her teenage years, as joint author of Puberty Blues (1979), the iconic Australian coming-of-age book. While her co-author, Kathy Lette, gained fame in London, as a raunchy, in-your-face Aussie, Gabrielle went in the opposite direction, eschewing cheap publicity, seeking out quality and truth in her life and interests, living with dignity, grace, and style. She wrote with a ring of authenticity and often with Joycean frankness (and humour) about her life, the terminal illness of her mother, her relationship with a prisoner in a Parramatta jail, her literary passions and connections, her father’s suicide, her own struggles with mental illness. She went through a Mexican phase as well as an Irish one, which endured in the annual ‘Day of the Dead’ parties in her Ashfield home. In the last ten years, she excelled in a hybrid genre, linking literary biography and personal memoir, producing three successive books on Randolph Stow, Ivan Southall, and Elizabeth von Armin. These authors come alive through the intensity of her relationship with them, imbuing her beguilingly clean prose with the qualities of a romance or even a whodunnit.