Obituary: Remembering the highly talented Gerard Lee
Gerard Lee was an Australian screenwriter, novelist and director best known for his contributions to Australian independent cinema and for his long-standing collaboration with Jane Campion.
I first met Gerard Lee in the late 1960s when we were teenage cadet journalists. At that time he was languishing in the sports department of Brisbane’s tabloid Telegraph newspaper while I was a sub-editor on sister paper The Courier-Mail. I ran into him again several years later on the University of Queensland campus where I was fiction editor at UQP. We were both keenly interested in short stories and quickly became good friends.
Between 1978 and 1993 I published five of his books at UQP: the story collections Pieces for a Glass Piano and Eating Dog; the novels True Love and how to get it and Troppo Man; and the screenplay of Sweetie, Jane Campion’s first feature film, which Gerard co-wrote with Jane. They’d met at the Australian Film Television and Radio School in Sydney and later collaborated on the award-winning BBC miniseries Top of the Lake.
Sweetie won Best Screenplay at the Australian Film Institute awards and a coveted Camera d’Or at Cannes. Gerard went on to write or co-write the screenplays for other films including My Mistress, starring Emmanuelle Beart, and the multi-award-winning Breath, adapted from Tim Winton’s novel. Most recently he was working on a screenplay for the Peter Carey novel Theft, and another project with writer-director Wayne Blair, set in Blair’s hometown of Rockhampton.
Gerard wrote and directed his own feature film, the comedy All Men Are Liars,which opened the Sydney Film Festival in 1995. Set in tropical Far North Queensland it features an all-female band, infiltrated by a teenage boy trying to make enough money to buy his mum a piano. It was a box-office success and received a best film nomination at the AFI awards.
Named for the Catholic saint of motherhood, Gerard Majella Lee was born in Melbourne in 1951 to devout parents Brian and Dorothy. He attended St Thomas the Apostle convent at Blackburn. One of his short stories describes a five-year-old boy’s first day at school when he falls head over heels in love with “the beautiful beatific Sister Francesca”.
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When Gerard was 10 his family – including brothers Michael and Damian and sister Mary Jane – moved to Dutton Park in Brisbane. According to Mary Jane, he spent a carefree boyhood running wild in Dutton Park cemetery and mucking about on the river. He attended St Laurence’s College at South Brisbane before becoming a cadet journalist at the age of 16.
In his early 20s Gerard moved into a ramshackle share house overlooking the river in Rosecliffe St, Highgate Hill – a house later immortalised in Pieces for a Glass Piano and True Love. At Rosecliffe St most of his housemates were musos and they formed a band, The Toadettes, also known as Ronnie Ribbet and the Toadettes. The band played 1950s rock’n’roll covers at benefit concerts to support an underground magazine The Cane Toad Times. Another new band, The Go-Betweens, borrowed Gerard on one occasion to be drummer for their first gig.
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Even while building a successful career as a story writer, novelist and screenwriter, Gerard remained in spirit a gypsy troubadour, always ready to entertain friends on guitar or piano. And like many writers of autobiographical fiction, he stored up as raw material a wide range of life experiences – working at various times as a school teacher, university enrolments clerk, union official, salesman and freelance house painter. He also renovated a number of his own houses, mostly old Queenslanders.
Throughout his life, Gerard’s film-star good looks, boyish charm and larrikin spirit attracted a wide circle of friends, admirers and creative collaborators. He loved the water and lived at Bondi with his partner – architect and designer Kathryn Payne – for many years. I once went surfing with him there but he quickly left me behind, paddling out beyond the breakers on his body-board. He seemed to be always on the move, up and down the east coast – from a house he and Kathryn built on Magnetic Island to Cunjurong Point on the south coast of NSW. More recently they were restoring a beautiful old two-storey convent in Nowra.
An inveterate and observant traveller, Gerard published a collection of travel stories with the unappetising title Eating Dog. Ranging across Europe, Southeast Asia and Australia, it’s one of his best books and makes a pair with Troppo Man, set in Bali – a powerful novel that invites comparison with Paul Bowles’ North African classic The Sheltering Sky.
At times laugh-out-loud funny and irreverent as well as provocative, Gerard’s writing demonstrates a marvellous ear for dialogue and an uncanny ability to create characters with emotional depth. Many of his stories are about the search for enlightenment – and about the elusive quest for romance and love.
His last love affair was with his twin baby grand-daughters Cordelia and Georgiana, who attended his Dutton Park send-off on December 6, along with their parents Megan and Charles, Gerard’s son.
Though his half-dozen books are now long out of print, the time is surely ripe for a new generation of readers to discover the quirky, unsettling brilliance of this much-loved Brisbane writer.
Gerard Lee (1951-2025).
Craig Munro is the author of Under Cover: Adventures in the Art of Editing; Literary Lion Tamers: Book Editors Who Made Publishing History; Wild Man of Letters: The Story of PR Stephensen; and co-editor of Paper Empires: A History of the Book in Australia. He was also founding chair of the Queensland Writers Centre.