Artist on artist: Michelle de Kretser on the ‘pure joy’ of Shirley Hazzard

Michelle de Kretser is an Australian writer with a world view; her books – for which she has won multiple awards – have been set in Australia, Sri Lanka, France, Italy and India. It’s a global path which she herself has trodden, having been born in Sri Lanka, emigrated to Australia as a teenager and studied in Paris.

This worldliness is a trait de Kretser shares with another notable Australian author, Shirley Hazzard. Born and schooled in Australia, Hazzard left Sydney at the age of 16 and never moved back, living in Hong Kong, New Zealand, the US and Italy as a young woman, the latter two whilst working for the UN.

Following the publication of her first short story, ‘Woollahra Road’, in The New Yorker in 1961, Hazzard left her role with the UN and became a full-time writer, with her first novel The Evening of the Holiday, published in 1966. It was followed by The Bay of Noon, and in 1980, by the book which would earn her international recognition, The Transit of Venus.

Although somewhat marginalised in discussions of the great authors, Hazzard’s distinctive style has earned her a great number of admirers, including de Kretser. In 2019 – three years after Hazzard’s death – de Kretser chose to write about the author for Black Inc.’s book series, Writers on writers. And ahead of her appearance here in June 2025 discussing her novel Theory & Practice, we took the opportunity to find out more about why de Kretser is so drawn to this often overlooked author.

The first book I read by Hazzard was The Bay of Noon. It was the late 1970s, I was a university student, and happened to find the novel in a bookshop. I didn’t know anything about Hazzard, but the sleeve notes mentioned she’d been born in Australia. I’d only been living in Australia for about six years, and the Australian fiction I’d read up to that point was usually set in the bush or the outback, and often in the past. I found nothing to connect with in those books, and in my ignorance I assumed that all Australian novels were like that. So Hazzard was a profound revelation.

I remember lying on my bed and reading The Bay of Noon like someone eating a box of chocolates. It was just pure joy. Here was a novel written by an Australian woman about a young woman moving around the world, in places both familiar and unfamiliar to me. That in itself was extraordinary, as were her descriptions of Naples. It’s a book that describes love and tragedy and betrayals. It’s a novel about female friendship, complicated friendship, and complicated love, and it’s also a novel about history – the Second World War, Italian fascism, Italy’s colonies in North Africa, NATO and US imperialism. Here’s a very slim novel, a novella really, and yet it contains so many large things.

That first book of Hazzard’s was like nothing I had encountered before. I was very far from being a writer at that time, but it made a huge impression on me – it immediately made me want to go to Naples, of course. But I think what struck me most deeply was the narrative of this young woman – the protagonist – being caught up in the world historical and moving, travelling independently through it. That spoke to me in a deeply resonant way.

When I first read The Transit of Venus, I was terribly disappointed. That reaction doesn’t reflect well on me as a reader. But having read The Bay of Noon, and then Hazzard’s first novel, The Evening of Holiday, which takes place in Siena, I suppose I was expecting a glamorous Italian setting and a single, female protagonist with whom I could instantly identify. Instead, here was a big complex novel, a lot of which takes place in postwar Britain, an austere and decidedly unglamorous place. It was narrated in a cool, detached tone that held the characters at a distance. I finished the novel, but I couldn’t really see what all the fuss was about.

It wasn’t until the early 2000s that I returned to Hazzard’s work. I was a writer myself by that point, having recently published my first novel. Hazzard had published Greene on Capri, her memoir about meeting Graham Greene on the Italian island and their subsequent friendship. I thought it was very good. As I was putting it back on its shelf, The Transit of Venus caught my eye. I took it down, opened it, started to read, and I was transfixed. I sat down and read it pretty much straight through. I’ve read it at least six times since.

A lot of Hazzard’s own life unfolded like a novel. Her friendship with Greene began when they were sitting in the same restaurant on Capri; she overheard him trying unsuccessfully to recall a line by the poet Robert Browning, and as she left the restaurant she stopped by his table and supplied him with the line. She lived in different countries, on different continents, she worked for the UN as a young woman, and then at the age of 30 or so, she met and married an extremely wealthy man, Francis Steegmuller. She led a charmed life in so many ways, but she was always alert to suffering.

She never forgot that she was Australian. It was a source of pride and also irritation. It annoyed her that Australia wasn’t better than it could be. The Australia she knew and left was a terrible place, it was utterly parochial and provincial. She wanted to sting the country into doing better, trying harder.

She had an antipodean way of looking that she never lost. She looks at situations as an outsider, a way of seeing that cuts through to what is usually obscured, and it really speaks to me. There’s a moment in The Transit of Venus where Caro, the female protagonist, is in a room at the top of a building in England. The stairs that lead to it are steep and narrow and there’s a massive, heavy wardrobe in the room. When Caro looks at it she thinks of the men who had to manoeuvre that wardrobe up those stairs.

For a long time Hazzard suffered a real pasting from Australian scholars. One male reviewer infamously described The Transit of Venus as ‘the best dressed women’s magazine fiction of the year’. When I wrote my book on Hazzard I went back and read the reviews and scholarly articles about her and many of them are shockingly bad. The best are blandly admiring and descriptive, with little critical acumen; and there are quite a few hatchet jobs. The latter are, by and large, written by Australian men. In her fiction Hazzard, by and large, isn’t complimentary about Australian men. These things are not unconnected.

Australia finds it very hard to forgive its artists who leave and don’t come back. Hazzard left Australia in 1947 at the age of 16 and never lived here again. I wrote a novel in which a character is studying Hazzard, and she writes down four reasons why she thinks Hazzard is undervalued in Australia; One, she is a woman. Two, she is a great artist. Three, she is fearless. Four, she has stayed away instead of coming home to be punished for one to three.

Hazzard reminds me of Antigone in classical myth, she has that absolute, intransigent sense of what separates justice from injustice. And, she pursues it, sometimes at the cost of her career. After The Transit of Venus, when she was at the height of her fame, she set aside fiction and turned to nonfiction to write Countenance of Truth, a book about how people high up in the UN had suppressed the Nazi past of their new Secretary General, Kurt Waldheim. The Transit of Venus had been a global hit and her publishers were desperate for her to go on and write another novel, and I really admire the fact that she said no, that she thought it was more important to tell the truth about Waldheim. Her character Caro is described as someone who will not give an inch on what she believes to be true and excellent. And I feel sure that Hazzard, too, had great personal integrity. I admire that about her, as well as her writing. Of course it makes her, like Caro, rather daunting as well.

It’s hard to pick a favourite sentence of Hazzard’s as there are so many wonderful ones. My copies of her novels bristle with Post-its. There are aphorisms and observations of striking truthfulness on every page. But here’s a phrase that’s stuck with me from The Great Fire, which is partly set in 1940s Hong Kong: ‘limp, soiled, colonial money’. It’s such a simple yet accurate, tactile observation. I know the touch of those limp, soiled banknotes from growing up in Ceylon. And obviously it’s a metaphor as well, a reference to the soiled currency of colonialism itself.

Her characters are people who are caught up in history. Their lives and fates are determined by world historical events – the world wars, Hiroshima, imperialism, the Cold War – they’re buffeted by history, they can’t escape it. And that is an aspect of Hazzard’s work that touches me profoundly.

She placed transcendent value on literature and art. She absolutely believed that it was of vital importance to society – poetry in particular, but art and literature in general. Who is the writer who wouldn’t find that inspiring? I can be having a bad day and thinking why do I do it? And then I remember that Shirley Hazzard said it matters. Her absolute faith in the enduring importance of literature is so consoling.

All good books repay rereading, but Hazzard’s more than most. They have depths and layers, and no one can possibly appreciate that intricacy on their first reading. When I reread The Transit of Venus for the sixth or seventh time in 2018, I suddenly started noticing a heap of little echoes and patterns – for instance, references to cold feet are woven through the book in different contexts. That’s such a tiny, tiny detail, and it wouldn’t matter at all if it wasn’t there. But it is. It reminds me of that old story about the medieval stonemasons who decorated the columns in the great Gothic cathedrals. When asked why they put so much work into carving intricate capitals way up high where no one would ever see them, they would respond that God sees them. Hazzard includes those minute details for the pleasure of making something beautiful and satisfying, for making a work of art.

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