Vale Brenda Walker, 1957–2024
I first met Brenda Walker in 1995 at Varuna Writers’ House in Katoomba, where she was working on her third novel and I was working on my first. The yellow house above the cliffs had been the author Eleanor Dark’s home. Her annotated research books were still on the shelves and her son’s gilded baby shoes on the mantel.
Within days, we had struck up a deep and sustaining friendship. In an early draft of Brenda’s novel Poe’s Cat (1999), I was the writer who climbed to the widows’ walk to watch the clouds. But Brenda was fearless in making swift cuts as she arranged strands of calm unspooling prose. In the final version, the too-close cousins Thea and Finn meet in a house that is still modelled on Varuna, with its long rhododendron-lined driveway, but it has become a dead relative’s half-abandoned home.
