Vale Shirley Cass: writer, artist and political influencer

Melbourne writer Shirley Cass’s work was shaped by her “impossible nostalgia” for “the place her parents left behind”.

I am not a very observant Jew, but my sense of who I am is tethered to my birth, to emigres – my Jewish parents … Because they were foreign, I too was foreign,” wrote Shirley Cass in her book Strangers and Love Poems.

Shirley Marion Cass, writer and artist, died in Melbourne in late June at the age of 86. Her work and much of her life were shaped by her “impossible nostalgia” for “the place her parents left behind”.

Eva and Ephraim Shulman left Russia and married in Palestine before emigrating to Australia in the 1920s. Those lands left behind would become “Elsewhere” for their daughter, a place she could “visit only by writing”.

In their East St Kilda home, the Shulmans raised two children, Phillip and the younger Shirley, born in 1935. She attended public schools, Methodist Ladies College, and the University of Melbourne, where she studied English and philosophy, graduating in 1955, shortly before her marriage to medical practitioner, Dr Moss Cass. She suggested they move to London, where they would spend the next three years and where their daughter, Naomi, was born.

In Moss Cass’ 2017 political memoir, he reflected that his time abroad and his wife’s free-thinking and Bohemian circle of friends “broadened his horizons” by introducing him to the progressive causes of the day.

Theirs would become an extraordinary personal and political partnership, full of arguments, full of love, and celebrated at a recent state memorial for Moss, who died at 95, less than four months before his wife.

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Shirley Cass: writer, artist and political influencer (SMH)

Photo: Shirley Cass (Geoffrey Bradshaw)