It was through the Jane Austen Society of Australia’s (JASA) newsletter, Practicalities, that I learned of the death of Yasmine Gooneratne, a woman with whom I have crossed paths – one way or another – three times. She was an academic at Macquarie University, where I did my undergraduate degree; she wrote a novel, A change of skies (1991), which my reading group discussed back in 1996; and, she was the patron of JASA (and you know how I love Jane).
You can find quite a lot about Yasmine Gooneratne on the Internet, if you are interested, so I’m just going to focus on a few points that struck me, and I hope will interest you.
“No nonsense”
A site called The Modern Novel provides a useful potted biography, so I will start with that. It says that she was born in Sri Lanka (then Ceylon) in 1935 as Yasmine Bandaranaike, which means she was “a member of the well-to-do Ceylonese family which included Sirimavo Bandaranaike, the first woman prime minister in the world”. She studied at the University of Ceylon and Cambridge University, and in 1962, she married the doctor and environmentalist Dr Brendan Gooneratne (who died in 2021). They emigrated to Australia in 1972, where she lived for 35 years, according to Wikipedia, before returning to Sri Lanka. It was here, in her home country, that she died on 18 February this year.
AustLit provides more detail, which includes that she was founding Director of Macquarie University’s Post-Colonial Literatures and Language Research Centre from 1989-1993, and that she was awarded an AO (Order of Australia) in 1990 “for her distinguished contribution to Sri Lankan and Australian literature”. She won (or was listed for) a number of awards in Australia and elsewhere.
Gooneratne wrote over twenty books, including novels, some poetry and short story collections, as well as many works of non-fiction, but she seems little known outside academic circles (and JASA). Indeed, my initial – and general – search for this post brought up many references to her but no news items on her death. I had to search a little more specifically for that. This was interesting given that, on the several internet sites I found, she is described as widely known. DBpedia* calls her a “Sri Lankan poet, short story writer, university professor and essayist” and says that “she is recognised in Sri Lanka, Australia and throughout Europe and the U.S.A., due to her substantial creative and critical publications in the field of English and post-colonial literature”.
When I did find something about her death, I was delighted to find an obituary written by her daughter Dervika Brendon. Initially posted in the Sunday Times on 18 February 2024, it has been shared on many other sites including the blog I am quoting from. It provides a loving and personal tribute to her mother, but one which I suspect also rings true to the person Gooneratne was. Dervika Brendon tells us that:
Yasmine Gooneratne as a private individual left clear instructions about what she wished regarding her funeral. Her directives show a great deal about her character and her values. ‘No public notices. No public viewing. No public funeral. No memorial lectures. No fuss. No feathers. No posturing. No performativeness. No photographers. No selfies. No celebrities. No nonsense.’
I have mentioned Gooneratne a few times on this blog, including in a brief Monday Musings post I wrote in 2013 on Migrant literature. It had been a long time since I’d read A change of skies (and it’s even longer now), but I wrote that the novel was about “educated middle class migrants – like herself I presume – who work to find a balance between fitting into the new culture while at the same time preserving their Sri Lankan identity”. If you want a better flavour of this work, check out this post written in 2012 by someone called Elen on a blog called the southasiabookblog. Elen says that Gooneratne’s “portrayal of the immigrant experience is as funny and poignantly ironic as Jhumpa Lahiri’s work on a similar topic is earnest”. I wish I could remember it that well, but I read it when I was immersed in parenting and my memory is general. This description of Gooneratne’s tone, however, sounds like the writing of an Austen-lover!
I will end with another paragraph written by her daughter because, not only does it tell us a lot about Gooneratne but, if you are an Austen fan, you will love the final line:
She had great contempt for hypocrisy and cruelty. She had a great sense of humour and a lively sense of fun. As she was a person of moral integrity, the repulsive conduct of people who prey upon the vulnerable saddened her, especially as she grew older. While always choosing to believe the best in people, she found herself unable to accept the lies that are spun by opportunists and predators on a daily basis. Her good opinion, once lost, was lost forever.
* DBpedia describes itself as “a crowd-sourced community effort to extract structured content from the information created in various Wikimedia projects”
Whispering Gums 
This seems a bit like the situation when Antigone Kefala died… I don’t pretend to be an expert on OzLit but I was surprised that I knew next to nothing about someone so widely respected in the literary establishment. If not for Giramondo sending me a copy of her Late Journals which were published in 2022, I wouldn’t have heard of her at all. It seems as if there’s a whole literary ecosystem that is closed off…
It does, Lisa. Interestingly, my reading group had scheduled Kefala in 2022, but access to her book proved too difficult so at late notice we changed.
Many years ago when I first came across A Change of Skies I wrote to Yasmine G. I found it a laugh-out-loud novel pricking the image of a serious-minded assumption of the country as a successful multicultural country (as stated by so many Aussie politicians who are clueless and ignorant on the nature of our society). I did not know she had returned to Sri Lanka. Thanks so much for this notice, WG.
Thanks Jim. I didn’t know she had either. I wish I remembered that novel more. Unfortunately too it was from the time we were sourcing some of our reading matter from the Council of adult Education, so I don’t even have a copy. Hmm, wonder if is on the Kindle.
I can’t find my hard copy on my shelves – fearful I may have permitted someone to borrow it???
And you didn’t keep a record?!?
It seems her daughter might venture into writing, no …? – what a loving tribute.
Yes, I wondered MR. She clearly knows her Austen too!
Oh yes, I forgot Mr Darcy’s utterance. :)
But you recognised it!
Surely one of her most-quoted lines ? :)
One of many!
Thank you for sharing this news, Sue. I was fortunate to have Yasmine Gooneratne as the occasional speaker when I graduated from a BA(Hons) at Macquarie University in the late 90s. I still remember parts of her wonderful speech, which inspired me to read ‘A Change of Skies’ and ‘The Pleasures Of Conquest’. Time for a reread if I can track down copies!
Thanks Agnes. She was there when I was at Macquarie in the early to mid seventies … I love that you remember passers of her speech. The books are hard to find it seems. The old backlist problem.
Hi, I’ve been reading your newsletter for a while now and was interested to read that you heard about Yasmine’s passing from JASA’s Practicalities. As a JASA member myself I’d love to hear from you. Would you mind sending me an email, please? Best wishes Cheryl Hill JASA committee
Thanks Cheryl … and yes, I will.
I heard an interview, several years ago now, with a woman who’s well known in Canada for having written many obituaries of public figures, and how (in her day, which is waning) they would often begin working on the process many years in advance, arrange for her to meet with these people, knowing they were ageing and time was passing (sometimes, for instance, time since they’d held a public office, in government or what not) and the amount of material that she would collect even before she had begun to officially work on the pieces but, then, how the process would escalate with word of, say, an illness or in the case of dementia special arrangements would be made farther in advance of their death if that was still possible. All that to say, that this kind of obituary, loving and knowledgeably crafted by her daughter, would make for a wonderful remembrance, not only for those who knew her well, but for her readers too (who knew her rather differently, of course).
Yes, Marcie, I had heard that basic obituaries are prepared in advance for aging famous people. These days they’d all be nicely, you hope, filed away in some directory and easy to pull out at finalise when the sad day comes. This one though looks straight from the heart of the daughter, doesn’t it?
I’m not sure what’s available through Amazon over on your side of the world, but Sri Lankan-American civil rights attorney A.M. Blair is a blogger (well, she’s been silent for a while) who has rewritten two Jane Austen novels through a Sri Lankan lens. There is A Case of First Impression: A Courtroom Drama Inspired by Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice and Amelia Elkins Elkins: A Modern Retelling of Jane Austen’s Persuasion.
Oh thanks Melanie … I haven’t heard of her. Interestingly I’m reading a book by, I was going to say, a Sri-Lankan-Australian novelist but I’ve just checked her Wikipedia page and it calls her British-Australian! She was born in London to Tamil refugees.