Sydney Journals: Reflections, 1970-2000

by Antigone Kefala

Written from her home in the Sydney suburb of Annandale over a period of thirty years, but ranging widely, to Broken Hill and Wilcannia, Paris, Venice, Prague and Athens, Kefala’s Sydney Journals portrays the intellectual milieu of the writer and her circle, many of them emigrés, a world sustained by conversation and friendship, and by reflection, on books and paintings, plays and films, and literary fortune.

At the same time the journals record, with a poet’s eye, the domestic and public life of the period, the changing seasons, the ageing of the writer and her companions, and the dramatic beauty of the city and its landscapes.

Genres: Nonfiction, Australia

246 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2008

Reviews

[Cheryl · Rating 4 out of 5]

Antigone Kefala is known as one of “Australia’s best-kept secrets.” Her writings and musings in Sydney Journals highlight this.

Sydney looking very beautiful at night, lighted up with the moon on top of the buildings, colored reflections on the water, the sea, between the two sides, a lake. An intimate feeling that you could have touched the other side if you stretched your hand.

My recent readings have me revisiting the journal form as literary expression (I’m also completing Volume 2 of Anaïs Nin’s diaries). And I’m reminded that different forms of art can be both lifestyle and thought, a way to view the world and a way to exist in the world. Kefala observes the works of Rilke, Hardwick, Kertész, and Bulgakov with the sharp, succinct pen of a poet. She was an avid reader, and it shows: "Georgia O’Keefe: ‘Where I was born and where and how I lived is unimportant. It is what I have done with where I have been that should be of interest'."

I read these journals and gladly drifted away to literary spaces with her, to different countries, different cultures, to a world illuminated by art. These journals are an ode to how one’s art can shape both the internal and external life. When you view the world as a creative, you see things differently. Places and experiences become blank canvases for exploration. Her travel journals were most appealing. On a personal level, they reaffirmed my dreams to visit Venice, Sydney and Prague one day.

I have become very fond of the city. Going out in the coolness of the morning, the sea, the wooden poles in the water, three every time, embracing each other, the intimate squares, the few trees, the delicate pink glass streetlamps.

She is sparse and clever in her journaling. Like poetry, subtlety lingers with each line, words glide with lyric. Reading these journals is a transfixing experience: a page or two turned with coffee in the morning, three or four turned before bed, a few more pages turned as you sit alone in a crowded restaurant in a new city to still the noise, and days later you find yourself still turning. Like Nin, Kefala makes everyday observations profound, and this makes you start to consider how you observe people, how you observe the world:

Listening to the singer, I thought of that amazing sweetness that I discovered in Spain, an unimagined sweetness, that is yet not too much, the absolute, refined sweetness that still maintains a backbone, that travels from cakes, to oranges, to language, to the light and back again.

Antigone Kefala recorded these ten journals over 30 years. From her internal life you also get glimpses of both a domestic and global world (at one point she made me revisit Lena Horne’s story of resilience, made me search for the documentary). She was born in Romania and her family moved to Greece and then New Zealand after World War II. She later relocated to Sydney, Australia. Her lyrical prose does not address her search for home directly, and yet the search is illuminated, even as her bond with the Australian literati is accentuated.

[ariana · Rating 4 out of 5]

a brightening and animating read, oh i love to identify sydney spots !!

[Lia Perkins · Rating 5 out of 5]

Such a brilliant, poetic voice. I want to read everything Kefala has written. The closing line, a quote, was:
'It is on behalf of myself and my friends that I read, that I reflect, that I write, meditate, listen, look and feel. In their absence, my devotion refers everything to them. I dream unceasingly of their happiness... It is to them that I have consecrated the use of all my senses and all my faculties; and that is perhaps the reason why, in my imagination and talk, everything gets slightly improved and exaggerated. They sometimes reproach me for this, the ungrateful wretches'

[Yvonne Boag · Rating 4 out of 5]

When I was given this book to read my first thought was that I would find it a bore. Journal entries? I've never been interested in writing my own let alone reading other peoples. But I was in for a very pleasant surprise. Sydney Journals by Antigone Kefala was a beautiful read, the writing style elegant and flowing. Spread over thirty years, set in Australia and abroad she muses on beauty, death and humanity. A month may be covered in a paragraph or a couple of pages, words leaping from the beauty of the light on the water at Sydney to an art exhibition. I found these insights fascinating and absorbing, these moments in her life forever captured in the art of her writing. I am left amazed at her talent and silenced by my own ignorance.

[Claire · Rating 4 out of 5]

more people should read this!

[Terra Travis · Rating 4 out of 5]

I’d have been friends with Antigone. I’d have let her put whatever Aussie television documentary on she liked

[Hannah · Rating 4 out of 5]

I want to submerge myself in this book, get lost in the pages and in the beautiful vignettes Antigone Kefala (1931-2022) composed about her everyday life. There is a loveliness to the simplicity of detail and a richness of experience in Kefala's Sydney Journals: sparks of ideas and conversations, notes about writers and cultural figures, musings in foreign cities, a pinning down of fleeting moments. In the reading, I felt a stirring of creative impulse, the energy to embrace the day and face the blank page in my own simple way. Just lovely.

[Ryan T · Rating 4 out of 5]

My favorite detail is how she describes her friends’ appearances, especially their eyes.

[Ian, etc. · Rating 4 out of 5]

Fully lovely. If all nonfiction were written this way, I’d like the genre very much, this the kind of simple I want to be capable of writing. Fitting project for a journal, wrestling with the changes. What change signals: death. The far ocean, pooling in the corner of your eyes. The overwhelming downward tide of the Mother. The liminal, evasive revelations of the Father. God, I am open to dying, but I want always to be recognizable. I want to be new and still know where I came from. I want to be good to the dead and to everyone else.

Delighted to be apparently the first member of the public to read and review this particular printing (even on Goodreads, believe it or not). Maybe more delighted than is warranted, considering the original version has been in publication with Giramondo in Australia in 2008. Still, very happy to support my very local publisher Transit Books (who have yet to let me down), and very grateful to receive a very early copy through their book club subscription. Not to push the consumption point too strongly, but these subscriptions have been an absolute joy. What better item to find on your doorstep than a beautiful new book? None.