When Charmian Clift returned to Australia in 1964 after fourteen years abroad, she began writing a weekly newspaper column that became one of the sharpest running commentaries on Australian life of the period. 

Images in Aspic gathers a selection of those pieces: brief, observant essays on homecoming, gender, manners, sex, suburbia, teenagers, technology, social class, cliché, and domestic life. For Clift, a party dress becomes an essay on spectacle; a newspaper letter opens onto women’s status; the view from a window becomes a way of thinking about belonging. She is funny, irritated, cosmopolitan and unusually alert to the language people use to disguise convention as common sense. The columns sit somewhere between literary essay, social criticism and personal dispatch, and their compactness is part of their force: Clift can dismantle an entire Australian habit in four pages and still have room for a joke. Long undervalued as merely a popular columnist, her essays now look much more obviously like a significant body of Australian nonfiction. 

Angus & Robertson / HarperCollins, Pymble, NSW, 1992. First printing of this 1992 edition. Paperback. Originally published by Horwitz in 1965; this edition follows the 1989 republication. 148 pp.  Light shelf wear and minor rubbing to covers and extremities. Pages clean; binding firm. Very good condition.