My Brother Jack may have been required reading in every Australian school, but not having gone to an Australian school I never heard of George Johnston until I visited the island of Hydra during my two years in Greece.
There I was shown 'the house by the well', later known as the "Australian house", where the Australian George Johnston lived with his wife Charmian Clift, and were their third child, Jason, was born in 1956.
Both George and Charmian lived on Hydra from 1955 until 1964, hoping to make a living from their writing. They wrote several books, George his now famous trilogy "My Brother Jack", "Clean Straw for Nothing", and "A Cartload of Clay" and many more, and Charmian her autobiographical "Mermaid Singing" and "Peel Me a Lotus", plus novels and short stories.
They never made a living from their writing and lived in constant debt until their assisted passage back home as "£10 Poms" aboard the ELLINIS (the same ship I boarded in Cape Town to return to Sydney in 1969).
In 1962 an American photographer, Robert Goodman, wanted to produce a picture book on Australia. He had been sent to Australia by National Geographic and was resting on a bed at the Stuart Arms Hotel in Alice Springs when "it suddenly hit me ... I didn't think Australia was being publicised properly and I reasoned, a stranger looking at the country and its people could have clearer eyes than those who lived here ..."
He came back in 1964 and travelled across Australia for two years, snapping away, but he realised he needed some help. As he was having a drink in an Adelaide hotel with artist Sidney Nolan, George Johnston walked in. Sid introduced them and said, "Grab him. He’s your man."
Goodman said to Johnston, "I like you and I like what you write. We both like Australia and I want to produce a whacking great book about it." Johnston, who had just returned to Australia with his family after spending nine years in Greece, took on the job. The whacking great book, published in 1966, was titled "The Australians", and it became a huge success with just about every household in Australia owning a copy.
Every household in Australia should still own a copy today because it is a whacking great book, perhaps the greatest ever written about Australia. Its opening line draws you right in: "It was never really intended as a place for people."
And it continues, "Into this land - whose nearest continental neighbours harbour man's earliest beginnings, oldest histories and more than half of the earth's people - a numerically small cluster of white people has been set down by the chances of history. As a people, the Australians are a good deal younger than the Age of Reason and any number of extant British tailors; even the sandwich has a continous recorded history older than Australia's by thirty-eight years."
That was written in 1965, just three years after the Aborigenes had been given the right to vote, so some of this text may no longer be politically correct in these times of thin-skinned feelings, but "It was never really intended as a place for people" still resonates.
Perhaps it wasn't intended as a place for the Johnstons either because, with the exception of son Jason who is now 67 years old, Charmian committed suicide in 1969, aged 45, George died the following year from tuberculosis, aged 58; their daughter Shane committed suicide in 1974 at age 25, and son Martin died an alcoholic in 1990, aged 42.
George Johnston sums up the rest of us in his closing paragraph: "What is important, finally, is that we are here, and we have dug in, and we are going on." Albanese and Labor's worst efforts won't change that!
P.S. In case you played truant the day they read "My Brother Jack" at school, here is a copy of the book and here is a trailer of the movie.
