In the early hours of last Sunday morning, I read the email letting me know that Antigone Kefala had died. I happened to be up as I often like working during that disconnected quietness that only the dark can offer. Everyone else was asleep and so I sat there in the stillness, just me and my thoughts, alternately crying at the desolate sense of loss I was feeling and losing myself in the many memories of this remarkable woman. I felt so fortunate to have had her in my orbit, so privileged to call her my friend and so profoundly grateful for her writings that I so loved from the minute I first encountered them.

Antigone Kefala was a writer of extraordinary talent and craftsmanship. Her presence loomed large at every conference and seminar that we organised at RMIT during the 1980s and 1990s and she was a revered presence at the Antipodes Writers Festival that Helen Nickas and I directed in 2012. In person she was always elegantly dressed, beautifully spoken, gracious to a fault and possessed the most glorious laugh that seemed to resonate throughout any room that she was in. I remember being mesmerised by her terrace house in Sydney – a gorgeous home, every aspect of it reflecting her love of books and art. Her downstairs study, where she informed me she carried out all her writing, I recall as an idiosyncratic space, a sort of fusion between architecture and a writer’s inner world that melded into one.

She had been in the spotlight quite often in the last few years, her gravitas as an important person of letters unequivocally establishing itself both within the Greek community and the wider Australian literary landscape. There was Vrasidas Karalis and Helen Nickas’ Antigone Kefala, A Writer’s Journey (Owl Publishing, 2013); she loomed large in my own doctoral thesis, The Shadow and the Muse (La Trobe University, 2018); she inspired both a conference and conference proceedings, respectively convened and edited by Elizabeth McMahon and Brigitta Olubas, Antigone Kefala, New Australian Modernities (UWA Publishing, 2021). Indeed, the title of this piece, ‘dancing to the rhythm of her words’, is from the article I wrote in tribute to Antigone in this beautiful publication. And then, of course, there were the prestigious awards: Queensland’s Judith Wright Calanthe Award in 2017 and the very recent Patrick White Award, in November 2022; as well as the fact that she had been included in an endless number of significant anthologies both within Australia and overseas.

Antigone Kefala: Photo: Supplied

Although I respected Antigone Kefala’s writing as a literary researcher, I loved her writing as a reader – I was mesmerised by it from the first minute. I loved the feeling of losing myself in it. Writer and visual artist Peter Lyssiotis introduced me to her words just over 40 years ago:

We travelled in old ships

with small decaying hearts

rode on the giant beast

uncertain

remembered other voyages

and the black depths

each day we feasted on the past

friends watching over

the furniture of generations

dolphins no longer followed us

we were in alien waters…

I was entranced at how familiar it was: we, the second-generation along the Greek diasporic chain, had internalised this alternate narrative all our young lives of the inauspicious arrival of our parents on old decaying ships. I was also entranced at how unfamiliar it was having this story narrated in the English language by a writer whose name signalled her Greek ancestry. Although in English, this poem had a cadence that set it apart from the, primarily, male writers that I had been studying at university. Furthermore, it spoke of negotiations with the past, a past characterised by other displacements, of friendships severed through geographical distance, keepsakes instigating memory relegated to an uncertain fate, and an allusion to the cognizance of what was to come. I’d never read anything like it and felt quietly proud that I was part of a culturally and linguistically marginalised community that could produce a work of art like that.

I actually met Antigone Kefala early on, during a trip to Sydney, and very quickly understood the limiting perception of referring to her as a Greek-Australian writer. Indeed, she became cognizant with a multiplicity of diasporas being a child of Greek parents who were part of a long entrenched middle-class Greek community in Romania. Political circumstances forced them to flee as refugees to Greece, then to New Zealand, and finally to Sydney, Australia where she lived for the rest of her life. She spoke a number of languages fluently, but English was her preferred language in her literary endeavours. As a voracious reader of her poetry and prose, many passages have become engraved in my heart. She was witty (describing marriage as an ‘acquired taste’ in The Island); she was poignant (her passages about musician Nicholas’ descent into mental illness while making ‘repetitive noises with a machine’ in Alexia); she was heartbreakingly honest (her poem, ‘Growing Old’ about progressively losing friends and family members); she reduced me to tears (her moving depiction of her close relationship with her mother in Summer Visit). I would like to leave the last word to Antigone herself. Although she spoke several European languages fluently, had lived in numerous countries, it was the city of Sydney that became home for most of her adult life and she wrote many exquisite passages about her love for it. The following is from Sydney Journals:

The magic of the city in summer, at dusk, holding your breath. The smell of the empty streets, the post office clock glowing in the night…

My type of country.

Antigone Kefala was much loved and admired by many. May her memory live on eternally.

Dr Konstandina Dounis, Monash Education Academy, Monash University.

For further enquiries about Antigone Kefala’s publications, please contact konstandina.dounis@monash.edu or www.owlpublishing.com.au