Read it online at www.archive.org
In 1966, after his return from Greece where he and his family had lived on the island of Hydra for about nine years, Australian author George Johnston wrote the 50,000-word accompanying text for American photographer Robert B. Goodman’s large-format pictorial coffee table book, "The Australians".
Despite the success of his classic semi-autobiographical novel "My Brother Jack" that same year, he was heavily in debt and chronically short of money. Needing money to support his family and to cover mounting medical bills from his worsening tuberculosis, he accepted a flat, one-off fee rather than a percentage of royalties, which meant he missed out on a massive windfall when the book became a bestseller.
He died on 22 July 1970, just 58 years old, in Sydney. To quote from his obituary in the Canberra Times on 23 July 1970:
Born 20 July 1912, died 22 July 1970
"Johnston visited about 60 countries during his life and his 25 books were partly a record of his travels. Their settings included such countries as China, Greece and Assam. In China in 1945 he was horrified to find the bodies of 100,000 people who had died of famine and he later returned to the country in his imagination in one of his earliest semi-autobiographical novels, 'The Far Road'.
Greece was the setting for 'Closer to the Sun', a novel about a married couple on a Greek Island. The book was a slab out of his own life. He left a prosperous career as a journalist in London and went to Hydra for nine years with his wife, "to sort himself out". There he wrote a series of potboilers, including six widely translated mystery stories under the pseudonym, 'Shane Martin'.
On Hydra he contracted tuberculosis. At first he thought he had cancer. "I was geared for the short course'', he said. "Instead, I learned I had TB. It was the long course, unpleasant but slow, without even the drama".
Adjusting himself to the bad news, he got a sort of "womb-yearning" for the past. "A man brought a load of wood every day on a donkey and we kept the fire going day and night. Charmian sat beside me, and we talked interminably about my boyhood in Melbourne. I found after a while I could remember everything, every house, every shop ... It was then I had the idea of a trilogy".
The first volume, 'My Brother Jack', won him the Miles Franklin award in 1964. 'Clean Straw for Nothing' (1969) won it for him a second time. Between the two books he kept the money coming in with freelance journalism, documentary films and coffee table books, including the highly successful, 'The Australians'.
He had come back to his gumtree and kookaburra womb to find a new land, a people without a soul, and some uncomfortable ghosts from his past. "I would like to help Australians to find a new identity, a new soul, a new spirit", he said on television. But to do so he had to sort out his own attitude to a country where he had left "the irrecapturable rapture of being young". He was trying to do this in the third volume of the trilogy during the past year.
If he finished it, he said once, he would give writing away and go and fetch yabbies.
The yabbies never saw him. He took his gaunt, thin frame to a Sydney hospital, where he broke all the rules, and he died, still trying to sort out himself and his country."
In the 1970s, every Australian kid grew up reading George Johnston's "My Brother Jack" at school, and the book "The Australians" could be found next to the Iced Vovos on the coffee table of every Australian home.
It then vanished completely but occasionally reappears in op-shops. Whenever it does, I pick it up for a few dollars. It makes a wonderful gift for all those who hanker for the Australia of old when, according to the summary at the back, the population of Australia had just reached 12,728,461 on 30 June 1971. I don't know if the '1' at the end is me, because eighteen months earlier I had left Australia again for New Guinea. However, at the end of that same year on the island of Bougainville in Papua New Guinea, I became a 'naturalised Australian'.
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P.S. The five crime novels published under the pseudonym 'Shane Martin' (made up of the names of their daughter, Shane, and son, Martin) were written while Johnston and his wife, writer Charmian Clift, were living on the Greek island of Hydra. Johnston originally dismissed them as minor "potboilers", though they have since gained attention from literary researchers like Dr. Derham Groves in "Homicide on Hydra".
For more information, click here and here.
Some of them can be read online at www.archive.org:
Like everything else that Johnston wrote before "My Brother Jack", the Challis novels are out of print and more-or-less forgotten. If you happen to have a copy, I'll swap you a packet of Iced Vovos for any one of them.
