Cecily Crozier

Cecily Crozier (21 Jul 1911, Elsternwick – 2006, Adelaide) was an artist, poet and literary editor who co-founded A Comment, an avant-garde literary magazine in Melbourne.

Biography

Cecily Medland Crozier was born in Elsternwick, on 21 Jul 1911 to Australian-born parents Robert Henry Crozier (1884–1939), a mining engineer, and Elsa McGillivray (1881–1957). She had two brothers Laurie and Brian, two and five years her junior. The family was well-to-do and Cecily's presence at weddings as flower girl or bridesmaid was reported in the social pages of Melbourne newspapers. Her uncle was Frank R. Crozier, an Australian official war artist in WWI who was to continue a career as a painter after the war, and one of whose exhibitions was later organised by Cecily.

The family traveled for her father's work, first in Burma, before a return to Melbourne, and then to London when Cecily was about ten. Retreating from the London climate after two years her mother Elsa took the family to the south of France, to Nice, then Grasse, and Montpellier. There Cecily was educated at a convent for three months, and then in a Lycee until age fifteen. She learned piano before another move at eighteen to London, and there worked as an artist’s model. She joined her fiancée Nico for several years in Alexandria, where she designed and made clothes.

A Comment

When WW2 began Crozier returned with her mother to Australia. In 1940, noting Melbourne's lack of an avant-garde literary magazine, Cecily and her cousins Sylvia, Eila and Irvine Heber Green (1913–1997) decided to publish one. It appeared September 1940, one month before its better known contemporary, Angry Penguins, and was at first titled Comment, before settling on the less strident a Comment. Due to wartime shortages the magazine was printed on brown wrapping paper by Bradley Printers..

Irvine was a photographer, writer, and artist whose design, woodcuts, linocuts and tipped-in photographs appear throughout all editions of Comment until its demise after 26 issues in 1947. Soon after he joined the RAAF and was posted in aerial reconnaissance, they married in July 1941 she married. However, the relationship did not survive Cecily's affairs with two American contributors to the magazine Karl Shapiro, and Harry Roskolenko whose daughter she bore in 1947. Both wrote her into theirlater autobiographical writings; as Shapiro's ‘Bonamy Quorn’ in his Younger Son; and Roskolenko's ‘Emily’ in his books Baedecker of a Bachelor and The Terrorized.

a Comment promoted experimental, often surrealist, writing and published the work of some of Australia's most prominent modernists of the 1940s, including Max Harris, Adrian Lawlor and Alister Kershaw. It ran at a loss, with costs often met by Crozier and Green, until it was forced to fold after the Winter issue of 1947.

Later life

Divorced from Irvine Green, she married Ernst Heydeman, a Jewish chemist who had escaped from his native Germany, who spent the war years with the French Foreign Legion in Morocco before arriving in Australia about 1950, and whom she met through her music teacher. Over the next fifty years she showed Arab stallions and bred Dachshunds at her Longlo Kennels in Croydon. Cecily had completed drafts of her unpublished autobiographical Memoirs of an Australian Woman before she died at a nursing home in Adelaide in 2006, at age 95.