Vale Brenda Walker (1957 to 2024)

… make an honest platform of story in your mind, like a raft, using the sound timber of everything you’ve loved and read. As with any raft, it may sometimes feel unsteady; it may falter under the weight it must carry, and, over time, it will need repair. It may not withstand the sea for all eternity but nor does it need to – it needs to last a lifespan, nothing more.

– from Reading by Moonlight

Publisher Georgia Richter remembers Brenda Walker

It is with profound sadness that I and my colleagues at Fremantle Press acknowledge the untimely and sudden death of Brenda Walker, esteemed writer, Winthrop Professor of English and Cultural Studies at the University of Western Australia, past Stella Prize chair, and friend and mentor to many – a gentle, generous, considerate person and a writer of immense talent and deep insight.

In 2020, Brenda was one of the three external judges of the City of Fremantle Hungerford Award, on the anniversary of thirty years since she herself won the inaugural Hungerford with her brilliant first novel, Crush (1991). Of her Hungerford win, Brenda said, ‘There is no better way for a Western Australian writer to make the transition from solitary work to the literary community and the world of readers.’ Crush marked the beginning of a superlative writing career that saw Brenda become adored and admired nationally and beyond. One More River followed (Fremantle Press, 1993), then Poe’s Cat (1999), The Wing of Night (2005) and her memoir Reading by Moonlight: How Books Saved a Life (2010).

Brenda was awarded many times for her writing – winning the Nita Kibble Literary Award twice, a Victorian Premier’s Literary Award, the Asher Literary Award and the Waverley Library Award for Literature, and the O. Henry Prize in the US, as well as numerous shortlistings in state and national awards, including the Miles Franklin Literary Award.

My own life first intersected with Brenda’s via her writing. When I flew home from Perth to Melbourne the very first time, I gave my mother a copy of Crush, because I wanted to share with her its edgy, elegant, good-humoured West Australianness – an urbane thriller like no other I’d read before.

Decades on, in 2010, I gave my mother Reading by Moonlight, inscribed by Brenda with the words For Kay, in fellowship – a gift between two readers who both knew cancer and who knew the solace to be found in books in the middle of the dark night. I know that Brenda must have touched thousands of lives in the same way through her writing.

When I arrived in Perth in the summer of 1993, I had to decide whether I would enrol in the masters program at Curtin University or join the inaugural Master of Creative Writing program at UWA. My honours supervisor, Kerryn Goldsworthy, had already reached out to her friend Brenda Walker at UWA (Kerryn phoned Brenda to ask her to look out for me while I sat in her office in Melbourne Uni). And so Brenda was the person who first met me on the UWA campus – willowy, ethereal, kindly smiling beneath an enormous sunhat. Almost immediately, she said, ‘Let me show you a few of the places that I love.’ And so we drove in her car together, and I gazed out at the blue Derbarl Yerrigan (known to me in those days as the Swan River) and through Kings Park with its dense warm smell of eucalyptus.

As we talked, it began to dawn on me with a slow kind of wonder that Brenda was speaking to me as if I was already a colleague of hers. In that exact moment, I moved from undergrad to postgrad, from a girl finding her way to an adult whose opinions were sought and valued. We were writers together – two women talking who both loved language, and stories and words. I was a writer! I had arrived!

It was this car ride with Brenda that made me choose UWA, where I became the first of two masters students in a new creative writing program. Brenda and her colleagues Gail Jones, Dennis Haskell and Van Ikin were all hugely excited about the program’s possibilities. And it was this warm, easy gesture of hers that instilled in me the sense that the Western Australian writing community was collegiate, generous, inclusive and welcoming.  

I never forgot that gift of levelling Brenda had bestowed upon me. I thought of it when I met students and, later, new young authors – and I was mindful to follow her example that every new Western Australian writer is worth nurturing, and that we wordsmiths are fundamentally bound by our love of the craft, no matter where on the path of experience we may be. When I became a tutor in creative writing, I drew on and urged students to read Brenda’s helpful and informative The Writer’s Reader: A Guide to Writing Fiction and Poetry (2002).

I spoke to Brenda often over the years as her writing career flourished and mine morphed into one of editing and publishing. We became colleagues in a different way. I can’t count the number of times Brenda said to me, ‘Let me know how I can support the press’ – and so she provided statements of support for us, and read the manuscripts of new authors to provide cover quotes for their books and, of course, accepted the invitation to judge the 2020 Hungerford with Richard Rossiter and Sisonke Msimang – a monumental undertaking for which she was perfectly suited as a discerning wordsmith, a clever and passionate reader and an identifier of writing talent in others.

Many of our authors have told me across time that Brenda encouraged them in their writing or supervised their theses that we were now publishing, and how she was a friend, champion, exacting practitioner, canny therapist and gentle guide all at once. I had already learned, during my own masters, that Brenda did not ask for vulnerability without giving it in return – and that better, more genuine writing would always be the result.

Only once, recently, did Brenda refuse an invitation, and that was to come to the 2024 Hungerford ceremony to celebrate with alumni and to meet the new winner. She sent warm wishes and regrets, but was looking forward to a trip to Oslo with her beloved husband, Alex. This email exchange is my final correspondence with her and it is easier to think of her somewhere out in the world, filtering its richness and its beauty through her private wordscape, than that she should not be here anymore.

I know that in the Fremantle Press family – both in-house and our authors and collaborators – we who knew and loved her are mourning her passing. If there is supposed to be a pattern or a meaning in anything, it has felt terribly disrupted and broken this week. Brenda’s death makes no sense, and it reminds us that life is precious, too brief, and sometimes very unfair.

So it is that I am left thinking of all those accrued moments of warmth and generosity from one of the most lovely human beings I have ever known – the sum of many beautiful parts it is too early to be totalling.

Vale, Brenda. Thank you for all you did for us. The reach of your good deeds and beautiful words will continue far beyond a lifespan that has ended much too soon.