Remembering Ania Walwicz

The first time I saw Ania would have been at a poetry reading in Carlton or Fitzroy about 1977, about the same time I got to know Eric Beach, Ken Smeaton, Howard Firkin and all the rest. She would have been on a small stage, or in a small clearing, before a small audience, probably, but not necessarily, in a small hotel. She would have been neatly and slightly conservatively dressed, with a tasteful dash of European flair (like, say, a beret) and about 26 years old. Being small herself, she fitted right in, and being Ania she did it on her terms.

It wasn't a hard scene to fit into: tolerant to a fault almost. If you said you were a poet you were and fair enough. You sat and listened and in your turn you got up and talked. Simple. The problem for Ania was the country. It didn't fit her at all well. She was stuck in rather than sold on it.

Just thirteen years earlier Ania arrived from Poland with no English. For her, as for many migrants, it was not immediately obvious that the place was paradise. Not for her were old blokes called Clarrie who told you how to catch rabbits with salt. Nowadays people have forgotten how much poverty there was in Australia even in the midst of a post-war boom.

"We were so big there and could do everything. When you have lots you know it. Lucky and lucky and money. My father was the tallest man in the world. Here we were nothing. There vet in the district and respect. The head of the returned soldiers and medals. Here washed floors in the serum laboratory. Shrinking man. I grow smaller every day. The world gets too big for me. We were too small for this big country. We were so little. We were nothing. We were none and naught and no money. We were no speak. There we were big and big time. Here we were so little. Hardly any. We grew tiny. Scared lost not knowing how to speak. At the mercy of other people to put us up. We didn't amount to much. There I was good at school. Here they put me in a grade lower. We grew smaller in height. We were reduced. We had a smaller area. Before we had a house. And here we had only one room to be in. I had big ideas before and here I didn't know how to say what I wanted to be. Was no one and nothing at all." (Walwicz, ‘So Little’, Writings, 1982).

That was her early experience and she never stopped being anxious about the wolf at the door.

Being a pre-ordained artist was never going to help. Ania arrived with her ideas of art fixed. Essentially it was the Slavonic reverence for French culture going back to Catherine the Great. She had no issue with luxury – luxury she approved of, though her life was mostly abstemious – but the cultural desert in which this nation of philistines subsisted in ignorant bliss.

She liked Freud, Dada, Jung, Joyce, all the arts, especially the Avant Garde. She was fussy about her food. Secretive about her health. A gregarious hermit who brazenly exposed her most private self, undercutting her own pomposity with a sardonic humour that was now disarmingly naïve and then surprisingly shrewd and blunt. She regarded her own life as far from perfect, but she never gave sadness an inch. Her 'I' was objectified, the victim of a considered life

After I had known her a few months I mentioned to Eric that I thought she pretended to be mad to some extent to enhance her work. He said she was one of the few people he took seriously. She certainly took herself seriously. It was clear that writing was the only thing she ever wanted to do. That she managed to make a living from it in such a small country with minuscule markets for literature of any kind, let alone work as unconventional as hers, was quite an achievement.

Ania had a few friends, and plenty of friendly acquaintances. She lived in a cottage in Fitzroy. Later she bought a flat in Victoria St, but the cottage was perfect for her, and the landlords, an elderly couple, liked her and never raised the rent. She had a bedroom I never saw, a room for work, a tiny lounge we never sat in and an even tinier kitchen in which we did sit and drink ... tea.