In the middle of my arguments against going to The Beatles, my father-in-law suddenly roared, ‘The Americans should get out of Vietnam!’
I shouted, ‘Yes, they should get out!’ Then, ‘No, you can’t go to The Beatles!’ Feeling at the end of my tether, I turned to the eldest of the girls, saying, ‘I’ve a good mind to put you two in a book!’
She retorted, ‘What would you know about it, anyway?’
For a second I was nettled by her impertinence, then I realised she was right: I knew little about bringing up teenage girls, for I came from a family of four boys. I decided on the spot to write a novel about boys of about the same age as my daughters.
It took me four years to complete the book, as I had a heavy job with the Department of Civil Aviation: I was responsible for choosing men for Air Traffic Control, selecting both in Australia and in Britain. At least I had a start: the ABC had already read my tale of riding with Squid to school on a camel. Squid was based on a boy who lived next door to us in Frankston, a conman in the making.
The novel-to-be would be set in the small town of Frankston, thinly disguised as Kananook, in 1929, the year I turned fourteen. By then I had already suffered the schoolmaster on whom the character Moloney is based. I also had a London-born grandmother living in an East Melbourne home like the one mentioned in the book. But of the happenings in the story, only one actually took place: I witnessed the wreck of the small pleasure schooner Isis, but saw no one swim out to her. Also the dog Gyp, who drowned in All the Green Year, was our very-much-alive dog while I was writing.
In my school days at Frankston Primary School No. 1464 the playing area was large, with remnants of high original pine trees and acres of bush lying beyond. In our grade was a boy named Jack Smythe, who was older and much taller than any of us. He was of slightly gingerish complexion and was full of yarns about faraway places. He enjoyed boxing and tried to teach me—not very successfully. He went on with me to the Frankston and District High School, the only school on the Mornington Peninsula where students could matriculate. Though Frankston itself did not number much over two thousand people, buses ran students from as far away as Portsea.
Jack wrote a few lines of verse for the Frankston High School magazine about the encumbrances of his new life:
Another thing I do abhor
Is when the term report is bad
And you have to take the thing along
And show it to your dad.
His dad was said to be a formidable man, though I don’t remember ever seeing him. The local paper reported how skilfully he had defended himself in court on a minor charge: he had put the opposing counsel to flight. Jack was clearly afraid of him, which, for so big a boy, always seemed strange to me. He did not last long at high school. For a time he worked locally at labouring jobs, then he simply disappeared. His three elder sisters remained—all beautiful girls—but none of the family knew where Jack had gone. I never imagined then that some twenty-four years later I would make him the main character in a novel.
While thinking of the book’s theme I happened to read a reviewer’s remark that there was little humorous writing about Australian boyhood. This led me to re-use the camel ride with Squid, then dream up the events arising from the bullfight at the familiar Frankston pound. But I wanted to go beyond humour. The conflicts in my own domestic life could find outlet were I to write the story of one year in a boy’s life, not only the humour of it but its drama and pain.
As the narrator of the story, I felt myself to be not only Charlie, but also Charlie’s father. In one role I was more or less myself when young; in the other myself some thirty-five years later—a harassed father trying to pass on values once passed on to me. I would call the book Johnno’s Year, with Jack Smythe mostly in mind as Johnno.
In a way 1929 was the end of an era. Until 1930 Australians seldom heard the American accent, but then came talking pictures. Previously Hollywood films had been silent; ‘mood music’ was provided—piano and flute in Frankston. Now alien speech poured into our ears: in musicals, westerns, gang warfare, smart comedy. Implicit in my story of boyhood in 1929 would be the suggestion that our era had been much less Americanised than those to come.
With 1929 decided upon, I made pages of notes on the impedimenta that formed the background to our lives in those days: gramophones, cable trams, coppers for boiling clothes, blacksmiths, jazz garters, milk dipped by milkmen into billies outside every gate, and early, crackling radio. As an aid to my memory I read 1929 newspapers and discussed the era with others who had also lived through it. I think this research led Professor A. R. Chisholm of the University of Melbourne to remark in a 1966 review of the finished book: ‘His notations are so exact that I wonder whether this is a book of reminiscences skilfully retouched.’
I decided to relate the story in the first person, from the viewpoint of a secondary character; the main character would be Johnno. My sequence of happenings—grave, happy, hilarious—would be among a group of characters typical of my era. It was evident enough that the story would have to be larger than life to be worth relating; that more would happen in one year than would normally happen.
In 1962 I began writing. After a few pages I found myself baffled. My predicament will be clear from a series of questions I wrote down and tried to answer:
‘1. Are you writing as a boy relating his own story? If so, what sort of a boy?—Intelligent? Sensitive? Or a sardonic dinkum Aussie?
‘2. Or are you relating the story as a man looking back on his boyhood, recalling its scenes and conversations, but able to use adult terminology, an adult approach? If so, what sort of a man? Again, intelligent? Sensitive? Sardonic?
‘3. Or are you at an intermediate age? A youth of twenty or so with recent memories of boyhood. If so, what sort of a youth, etc?
‘No. 1. Writing as a boy limits you in vocabulary—which might not be a bad thing—but more seriously it limits you in maturity of observation, reflection, awareness. You cannot juxtapose happening A and happening B because the juxtaposition is howlingly funny, when only as an adult would you recognise its humour. True, this can chance to happen, but after several of these “chances” the reader feels doubtful of authenticity—as I often did in reading Huckleberry Finn. Too often I felt, “Here is an adult trying to be funny by posing as a boy and saying things he was only likely to have thought of as an adult.”
‘No. 2. Writing as a man looking back presents fewer limitations, but less immediacy. It can only be brought off if the man reveals himself infrequently and for the rest of the time relishes being a boy again. Alan Marshall does this well in I Can Jump Puddles. A man has looked back but his boyhood has repossessed him and he is only an adult when he needs an adult’s expanded vision, or wisdom, or power of sentence construction.
‘No. 3. Writing as a youth not long away from boyhood: I don’t know that much really separates this from writing as a man—not enough, anyway, for me to make the effort of returning to two earlier stages of life instead of one.
‘So I would elect to be a man looking back. What manner of man? Does this not in part depend on what I wish to depict? I want to depict the dry, blustering, rather hard Australian boy; but I also want to depict countryside, a little history, some drama and thought. The two don’t go together. I, the narrator, therefore cannot be the typical Australian boy. I can observe the typical Australian boy. With the herd I can—as boys do—behave like the herd. Alone I can reflect.
‘This shall be it then; look back as a man, but as a man who inwardly was not dry, sardonic, tough, even though he tried to conform to this Australian concept. Show, in fact, both sides, the sensitive and the tough.’
With my questions answered, the going became much easier.
While in Melbourne I wrote during lunch hours in the RACV men’s reading room and in the evenings on the dining-room table at home, interrupted often by homework and parent–t
eenage encounters of the very sort I was attempting to depict. I also wrote in aeroplanes, and in various hotels—both in Australia and Britain. I mention these things because I began to feel that my disjointed life was resulting in a disjointed book. But I always enjoyed the writing of it.
Fortunately my wife had become adept in bringing order to my much-corrected pencil originals through having typed No Moon Tonight, my factual Bomber Command book. Early in 1964 she completed the second draft of the book. This I corrected in a Cairns motel. Soon afterwards I had to leave again for England. I left the corrected manuscript at home, telling my wife that I would need yet another draft to work on before a final version was submitted to a publisher. Some four months later, just before I left England to return to Melbourne, the manuscript unexpectedly reached me; with it a wifely ultimatum: ‘I believe this is ready for a publisher. I have cut out the last sentence.’ In this sentence I had told that Johnno had sent money to my father to pay for the boat he had lost. I agreed at once with this deletion. It was better for the reader to reach out with his own suppositions.
My wife’s decision was vindicated. Being in London I left the manuscript with the agent who had handled No Moon Tonight. It was accepted soon afterwards by Angus & Robertson, London. Because I had not carried out my intended final checking, some names of Frankston people of bygone years and names of actual places remained in the story. I had used them because they came easily to me as I wrote. Geographically I had had to move the town well south of the actual Frankston in order that the Heads episode would be feasible. (The credibility of this episode I had verified with an expert on the seas of Port Phillip and the Rip.)
The manuscript went to that formidable editor Beatrice Davis, at the Sydney office of Angus & Robertson, who sought no change to it beyond telling me that Caruso and Melba were never in Melbourne together. However, she asked that the title Johnno’s Year be changed. This proved a laborious business.
With the book in print, two of Australia’s foremost critics, A. A. Phillips and Beatrice Davis herself, had similar comments to make. Both felt that the first part read as a book about boys; the second part—the flight from home—as a book for boys. I could only reply that I was writing as an adult repossessed by boyhood and that the state of ‘repossession’ intensified as the book neared its climax, so that, briefly, I shed my age and became in spirit a boy again. At least, this is what I hoped I had achieved.
To return again to our Templestowe home: a call came to me from a University High School English teacher, Vaughan Hutchings. Complimenting me on the book, he began reading extracts to me, saying, ‘That’s just how boys of that age speak!’ He then came quickly to the point: ‘How do I get it set for schools?’ I could only suggest contacting Beatrice Davis, little imagining that this would lead to the novel being read in schools for twenty years.
Having been medically retired from DCA at fifty-nine I was free to accept requests to speak at schools—and there were many. One year I was writer-in-residence at Tintern Church of England Girls’ Grammar School, and an extraordinary exchange occurred. During a lunchbreak an English teacher, Jan O’Neill, asked, ‘On what character is Johnno based?’
I told her he was based on three different boys I had known, but mainly on one named Jack Smythe.
To my astonishment she answered, ‘He is my uncle.’
After a moment I asked, ‘What happened to Jack?’
She said simply, ‘We don’t know.’
Years later Jan O’Neill was able to tell me that his grave had been found on Thursday Island. Much of his life had been spent in the Torres Strait Islands, in what capacity she was not sure. He died in 2006, aged ninety-three, on Horne Island, off Thursday Island. In 2012 Jack Smythe’s nephew told me he believed his uncle passed on building skills to the young men of the islands.
April 2012
The Commandant
Jessica Anderson
Introduced by Carmen Callil
Homesickness
Murray Bail
Introduced by Peter Conrad
Sydney Bridge Upside Down
David Ballantyne
Introduced by Kate De Goldi
A Difficult Young Man
Martin Boyd
Introduced by Sonya Hartnett
The Australian Ugliness
Robin Boyd
Introduced by Christos Tsiolkas
All the Green Year
Don Charlwood
Introduced by Michael McGirr
The Even More Complete
Book of Australian Verse
John Clarke
Introduced by John Clarke
Diary of a Bad Year
JM Coetzee
Introduced by Peter Goldsworthy
Wake in Fright
Kenneth Cook
Introduced by Peter Temple
The Dying Trade
Peter Corris
Introduced by Charles Waterstreet
They’re a Weird Mob
Nino Culotta
Introduced by Jacinta Tynan
Careful, He Might Hear You
Sumner Locke Elliott
Introduced by Robyn Nevin
Terra Australis
Matthew Flinders
Introduced by Tim Flannery
My Brilliant Career
Miles Franklin
Introduced by Jennifer Byrne
Cosmo Cosmolino
Helen Garner
Introduced by Ramona Koval
Dark Places
Kate Grenville
Introduced by Louise Adler
The Watch Tower
Elizabeth Harrower
Introduced by Joan London
The Mystery of
a Hansom Cab
Fergus Hume
Introduced by Simon Caterson
The Glass Canoe
David Ireland
Introduced by Nicolas Rothwell
The Jerilderie Letter
Ned Kelly
Introduced by Alex McDermott
Bring Larks and Heroes
Thomas Keneally
Introduced by Geordie Williamson
Strine
Afferbeck Lauder
Introduced by John Clarke
Stiff
Shane Maloney
Introduced by Lindsay Tanner
The Middle Parts of Fortune
Frederic Manning
Introduced by Simon Caterson
The Scarecrow
Ronald Hugh Morrieson
Introduced by Craig Sherborne
The Dig Tree
Sarah Murgatroyd
Introduced by Geoffrey Blainey
The Plains
Gerald Murnane
Introduced by Wayne Macauley
Life and Adventures 1776–1801
John Nicol
Introduced by Tim Flannery
The Getting of Wisdom
Henry Handel Richardson
Introduced by Germaine Greer
The Fortunes of
Richard Mahony
Henry Handel Richardson
Introduced by Peter Craven
The Women in Black
Madeleine St John
Introduced by Bruce Beresford
An Iron Rose
Peter Temple
Introduced by Les Carlyon
1788
Watkin Tench
Introduced by Tim Flannery
For more information visit textclassics.com.au
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All the Green Year Page 19
