ABOUT JANE

Jane Clifton is the genuine show-business all-rounder. Actress, singer writer and registered marriage celebrant, Jane is often asked if there is anything she can’t do, to which she simply replies ‘Ballet and making money.’

A B.A.(1972) graduate from Monash University’s halcyon days of sex and demos and rock ‘n roll, Jane was momentarily distracted from a promising career as an English teacher (she promised her parents she’d become one) by Melbourne’s burgeoning, alternative theatre and music scene.

The dim lights of Carlton’s La Mama, the Pram Factory, the Flying Trapeze, T.F.Much Ballroom and the Last Laugh Theatre Restaurant beckoned. While the allure of singing in bands with names like Scumbag, Toads and Lipp and the Double Dekker Brothers proved irresistible – Form 6 at Shepparton High would have to wait…

Despite these arty beginnings, Jane has managed to carve out a 4 decade-long, show-business career. Including:

• a string of minor roles in numerous early Australian TV shows from Division 4, Homicide, Ryan, Bluey and even Holiday Island,
• fronting the ground-breaking feminists-on-Countdown band STILETTO,
• being part of the smash-hit stage shows MUM’S THE WORD and
• MENOPAUSE – THE MUSICAL
• her top 10 pop singles GIRL ON THE WALL (solo) and TAXI MARY (with Jo Jo Zep).
• 3 published crime novels – Half Past Dead (Text 2002), A Hand in the Bush (Text 2005) Flush (Clandestine Press 2013) – and a memoir – The Address Book ( Penguin 2011).
• Jane’s solo CD The Marriage of Style (April 2003).

Notwithstanding all of the above, Jane will always be best remembered for a role she played 35 years ago: MARGO in Prisoner/Cell-Block H

Currently: Jane sings with her jazz trio on Mondays at Claypots, St Kilda, and is writing her 5th novel. Weddings and funerals keep her busy the rest of the time and pay all the bills!

How do you use your space?

“I use Office 15 to create the written word in many different forms – novels, speeches, MC notes, debates, articles for print. I have used the Courtney St-side boardroom for cast read-throughs of plays and also to cut out dressmaking fabric on the fabulous, huge and sturdy wooden table.

I am a fiction writer living and working in Melbourne. My short stories have been published in various literary journals and anthologies in Australia and the UK. I’ve won prizes and/or been shortlisted in national and international awards, including The Age, Bridport and Fish Short Story competitions. I have been awarded an Australia Council Writers Project Grant and short listed for a Varuna Writers Centre Partnership in Publishing award for a novel in progress. In 2016 I was awarded a Varuna Writers Fellowship to work on a linked collection of short stories. I have completed this collection and shaped it into a set of 5 linked novellas which I am now redrafting. I taught fiction writing in various places for over 20 years and I now run an occasional writing workshop!”