This meticulous and moving biography reads Mears' life and work within that broader cultural community to celebrate her truly extraordinary achievements and adventures.Īs far as inspiring books go, Leaping into Waterfalls is profoundly inspiring – both its subject is and the way this gifted biographer wrote her book. She was a prolific correspondent with significant figures of the cultural landscape-Gerald Murnane, David Malouf, Tim Winton, Elizabeth Jolley, Helen Garner, Drusilla Modjeska, Kate Grenville and Marr Grounds. Mears amassed an extensive collection of diaries, letters, manuscripts, photographs, recordings and ephemera, and deposited it with the Mitchell Library. Undaunted, she continued to write and publish until her death five years later in 2016.

By her mid-forties, multiple sclerosis had confined her to a wheelchair.

As an adult, she was plagued by ill health yet remained steadfast in her quest to be independent and free while recovering from open-heart surgery, she traversed the country alone in a de-commissioned ambulance. Mears' sensuality and sexuality were the driving forces of her life and writing. In her award-winning and acclaimed novels and short stories, Mears wrote fearlessly of the dark undercurrents of country and family life, always probing the depths and complexity of human desire. Gillian Mears appeared to many to be a shy woman from Grafton, but her lived and imaginative lives were rich with adventure, risk and often transgressive passion. Leaping into Waterfalls explores the rich, tumultuous life of Gillian Mears, one of Australia's most significant writers of the last forty years.

Foal's Bread by Gillian Mears