The Glenelg Writers' Circle

Origins and Foundation

The Glenelg Writers' Circle emerged from the confluence of need and opportunity in 1987, when Dorothy Campbell, recently retired from forty years of teaching English at Adelaide secondary schools, placed a simple notice on the Glenelg Community Centre bulletin board, inviting writers seeking other writers to gather each week for discussion and support, all welcome, Tuesdays at two. Campbell had envisioned perhaps three or four people gathering to discuss their work over tea; within a month she had eight regular attendees, each carrying notebooks full of words they had never shared with anyone.

The Glenelg Community Centre itself provided the perfect venue — a 1960s brick building on Partridge Street that had seen better days but possessed good natural light and a small meeting room that could be booked for a nominal fee. The room overlooked a courtyard where elderly residents practised tai chi on Thursday mornings and children's birthday parties erupted on weekends. This collision of community activities gave the writing circle a sense of being part of something larger while maintaining its essential privacy.

Campbell established the group's foundational principles in those early meetings, rules that would persist long after her death in 2003: every member could share or not share as they chose; criticism must be constructive and gentle; what was discussed in the circle remained confidential; and published success, while celebrated, was not the measure of a writer's worth. These principles created a space notably different from university writing workshops or competitive literary societies — here, the act of writing itself was valued over any particular outcome.

The Culture of Gentle Encouragement

The circle's approach to feedback distinguished it from more rigorous writing groups. Members learned to begin their responses with what worked in a piece before suggesting improvements. They asked questions rather than making pronouncements, wondering aloud what might happen if a poem ended a line earlier rather than declaring that an ending did not work. This method particularly suited writers who came to the group carrying various forms of damage — the widows writing through grief, the veterans processing war, the survivors of abuse like Heather who could only approach the truth obliquely.

Alice Morgan, who joined in 1990 after retiring from the State Library, would later describe the circle's method as literary group therapy without the therapy. Members wrote through divorces, deaths, diagnoses and disappointments, transforming experience into narrative or verse while sitting in mismatched chairs around a table perpetually stained with tea rings. The writing itself became almost secondary to the act of being heard, of having one's words received with respect and consideration by others who understood that sometimes the story on the page was the only way certain truths could be told.

Heather's Arrival and Integration

When Heather Smith first attended in September 1993, she was thirty-one years old and recently divorced, living alone in Glenelg for the first time in her life. Alice Morgan would later recall that Heather sat through three entire meetings without reading anything, simply listening to others share their work, her notebook closed on her lap like a secret she was not ready to tell. When she finally read — a short poem about shells and broken things — her voice was so quiet that members had to lean forward to hear, creating an intimacy that would characterise all her subsequent readings.

Peter Cross, a former journalist from the Adelaide newspaper The Advertiser who had joined the group after early retirement due to heart problems, recognised immediately that Heather's work operated on a different level from the memoir excerpts and gentle nature poetry that comprised much of the group's output. Her poems were technically sophisticated, emotionally complex and hauntingly ambiguous in ways that suggested professional training or natural genius. Only later would members learn that she had had neither formal education in poetry nor mentorship — she had simply been writing in isolation since adolescence, developing her voice without outside influence or validation.

The group adapted to accommodate Heather's particular needs without explicitly acknowledging them. They learned not to ask direct questions about her inspiration, understanding that her poems were both deeply personal and necessarily veiled. When she flinched at unexpected physical contact — even casual touches such as a hand on her shoulder — members adjusted their behaviour without comment. When she occasionally missed meetings during what she called her difficult weeks, no one pressed for explanations.

The Tuesday Routine

The Tuesday afternoon meetings developed a ritual quality that provided structure and predictability for members dealing with various forms of chaos in their lives. Alice Morgan always arrived first, setting up the electric kettle and arranging the semicircle of chairs. Peter Cross brought biscuits — the same brand of Monte Carlos every week for fifteen years. Dorothy Campbell, while she lived, sat in what became known as the moderator's chair, though her moderation was so gentle as to be almost invisible.

Each meeting followed the same pattern: fifteen minutes of arrival and tea-making, during which members chatted about everything except writing; Dorothy's gentle call to order; voluntary readings proceeding clockwise around the circle; feedback and discussion; then another fifteen minutes of departure rituals. This structure provided a container strong enough to hold difficult content while remaining flexible enough to accommodate varying needs. Some weeks only one person read while the others simply listened. Some weeks the entire time was spent discussing a single line that had proved problematic. The group shaped itself around its members' needs rather than forcing members into a predetermined mould.

The Publication Push

The impetus to publish came primarily from Peter Cross, who retained enough of his journalistic instincts to believe that good writing deserved readers. He was responsible for encouraging several members to submit to local publications, with modest success — Alice Morgan placed several essays about library life in The Adelaide Review, and Tom Bradley, a retired plumber who wrote surprisingly delicate nature poetry, won a commendation in a statewide competition.

But it was Heather's work that Cross championed most persistently, recognising in her poems something that transcended the merely therapeutic or local. For years he gently suggested she submit to journals, compile a collection, seek wider recognition. Heather resisted with a consistency that suggested not modesty but self-protection, until finally, in 2001, the combination of Cross's persistence and her own need for validation led to the creation of Reflections by the Sea.

Navigating Delicate Dynamics

The circle was not without its tensions and challenges. Personality conflicts arose — inevitable when people shared vulnerable work — but were managed through Campbell's diplomatic intervention and the group's commitment to its foundational principles. When new members occasionally arrived with aggressive ambitions or harsh critical styles, they typically self-selected out within a few weeks, finding the group's gentleness frustrating rather than supportive.

More complex were the occasions when members' writing revealed concerning personal situations. When the elderly member Grace Patterson began writing increasingly disoriented pieces that suggested dementia, the group had to balance respect for her autonomy with concern for her wellbeing. When the veteran Tom Bradley's war poetry became increasingly violent and specific, members worried about his state of mind while recognising that the writing might be his way of processing rather than planning. The group developed an unspoken protocol: maintain the safe space, while being prepared to reach out individually if someone seemed to be struggling beyond what writing could address.

After Dorothy Campbell

Dorothy Campbell's death in November 2003 created a crisis that threatened the group's continuation. She had been the quiet centre around which everything revolved, the gentle authority who could redirect discussion when it became too intense or draw out silent members who needed encouragement. Various members attempted to fill her role, but the group eventually evolved into a more democratic structure, with facilitation rotating among long-term members.

This transition period saw several departures and arrivals. Some members who had relied on Campbell's particular style of leadership found the new structure unsettling. But others, including Heather, seemed to flourish in the more egalitarian environment. Without a single authority figure, the group became even more collaborative, with members taking collective responsibility for maintaining the supportive atmosphere Campbell had created.

The Circle's Role in Heather's Final Years

As Heather's rheumatoid arthritis progressed after 2004, the writing circle became even more central to her life, one of the few social commitments she maintained even when pain and medication made leaving her flat difficult. Members noticed her handwriting becoming larger and more irregular as her hands struggled with fine motor control. Some weeks she would type her poems and have Alice Morgan read them aloud while she listened, a reversal of their usual roles that the group accepted without comment.

The circle provided practical support as well as creative community. When Heather struggled to manage her shopping during flare-ups, members would coincidentally drop by with extra groceries. When she could not afford a new printer to type her poems, one appeared at her door — a machine from Peter Cross's home office that he insisted he did not need. These acts of care were performed with the same gentle indirection that characterised the group's feedback, allowing Heather to maintain her dignity while accepting help she desperately needed.

Legacy and Continuation

Following Heather's death in February 2017, the writers' circle held a memorial meeting at which members read her poems aloud for two hours, voices breaking over lines they had heard her read in her characteristic whisper. Her empty chair remained in the circle for three months before someone finally suggested they needed the space for a new member, and even then the decision felt like a betrayal of her memory.

The Glenelg Writers' Circle continued to meet on Tuesday afternoons well beyond Heather's time, though its membership had largely turned over. Alice Morgan, into her eighties, still attended when health permitted, a living link to the group's earlier incarnation. Peter Cross compiled an anthology of members' work in 2018, dedicating it to Heather and Dorothy Campbell, though its distribution remained as local and modest as the group itself.

The circle's significance extended beyond its literary output, which remained modest by any commercial measure. It provided a model for creative community based on mutual support rather than competition, on process rather than product, on the understanding that writing could be a means of survival rather than a pathway to fame. For Heather particularly, it offered something she had found nowhere else in her life: a space where her voice was valued, where her truths could be told slantwise, where she could exist as a poet rather than as a failed mother or a broken woman.

The group's records — such as they were, mostly consisting of Alice Morgan's informal notes and the occasional photograph from a member's celebration — documented not a literary movement but something quieter and perhaps more essential: a group of people who gathered weekly to witness one another's attempts at making meaning through words, who created a small, safe space in a world that often felt neither small nor safe, and who understood that sometimes the most important thing was not the writing itself but the community that formed around it.