[1] In 1941 she won a Beach Girl competition run by Pix magazine and soon after moved to Sydney where she did modelling work to supplement her main job as an usherette at the Minerva Theatre.

[citation needed] On 8 July 1969, the eve of the publication of Johnston's novel Clean Straw for Nothing, Clift committed suicide by taking an overdose[8] of barbiturates in Mosman, a Sydney suburb, while considerably affected by alcohol.

[9] Academics Paul Genoni and Tanya Dalziell suggest in their 2018 book Half the Perfect World that it was the impending publication of Johnston's novel, which Clift knew would lay bare her infidelities while on the island of Hydra, which prompted her to suicide.

), but the stuff of which Clean Straw for Nothing is made is largely experience in which I, too, have shared and ... have felt differently because I am a different person ...Clift's autobiographical books Mermaid Singing and Peel Me A Lotus were reissued by Muswell Press in 2021, with new introductions written by novelist Polly Samson,[13][14] whose own 2020 bestselling novel A Theatre For Dreamers is a fictionalized account of life on Hydra in the 1960s, featuring real-life characters including Clift, Johnston and Cohen.

[19] In November 2023 it was announced that Clift was one of eight women chosen to be commemorated in the second round of blue plaques sponsored by the Government of New South Wales alongside, among others, Kathleen Butler, godmother of Sydney Harbour Bridge; Emma Jane Callaghan, an Aboriginal midwife and activist; Susan Katherina Schardt; journalist Dorothy Drain; Pearl Mary Gibbs, an Aboriginal rights movement activist; and charity worker Grace Emily Munro.