Because of the later troubles, we can easily forget how talented and engaging a person Johnston was in his earlier decades. He was one of a group of working class Australians growing up between the wars (Sidney Nolan was another) whose independence and un­pretentiousness produced a genuine local culture. Kinnane provides a full picture of Johnston’s childhood, his facility with words and paint, his newspaper career, first marriage and war correspondent role, the highlight of his Australian career. We also notice a personal ebullience combined with naiveté, traits whose fruitfulness diminished with time.

Kinnane is right in playing down expatriatism as a major explanatory theme. The Johnstons never intended to stay away for long, and anyway it’s who you are, not where you live, that counts in the end. A similar conclusion is reached in Gillian Bouras’s A Foreign Wife, which also compares life in Australia and Greece. She ends by quoting Henry Miller’s belief that visiting Greece taught him that ‘life can be lived magnificently on any scale, in any climate, under any conditions’.

Johnston increasingly saw his dilemma as philistinism and the journalistic rat-race versus the life of freedom and art, and this caused the move to the Greek islands. But this move involved misjudgements of his own talent and temperament. His real gift was not purely as a novelist, but as a social documentary writer, halfway between fact and fiction. Perhaps he should have moved into the higher journalism, like Alan Moorehead. The Mediterranean sojourn produced not art but pot-boilers, and not freedom but great pain and frustration.

This was because Johnston was temperamentally straight, unable to handle life as an habitué of the tavern, mixing with the international jet-set he disliked but couldn’t break away from. Charmian’s affairs drove him to distraction. Out of his depth, he tried for revenge through fiction. His somewhat unvariegated Australian personality now revealed its limits: he lacked subtlety, he was unable to examine himself, and he had no hidden layers or resources to call upon in a crisis. He continued to brag in the taverna, but less convincingly, and the despair he was unable to cope with began to eat him away, just as TB was physically.

There were no escape routes. Johnston had no identifiable beliefs nor friends to tum to for help. Writing about himself, he had no distancing devices, as Nolan and Moorehead had in their work on Gallipoli. The Johnstons never learned Greek, and remained outsiders on Hydra. Gillian Bouras shows the struggles but also the rewards of living in a ‘foreign’ folk culture’ one of which is release from obsession with the self:

In the Greek countryside names are used for social labels, as indicators of where one fits in the scheme of things, rather than as symbols of individual identity. People ask Dimitrios and Nikoaos, ‘Whose are you?’ not ‘Who are you?’ and they answer ‘Tou Yeorgi’ – George’s.

The Johnstons couldn’t flow out into their surroundings; instead they became trapped in a no-man’s land of increasingly bitter self-recrimination, fataly attracted to their ‘Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?’ roles.

Charmian was endlessly described as pagan, freedom-loving, a free spirit, saying yes to life; but the Johnstons never got past an unexamined cult of passion, whose ramifications they could not handle. What made Charmian tick? We never know – she remains opaque while George is transparent. Johnston later summarised his own dilemma quite brilliantly in notes he made on Cressida/Charmian:

She represents the unattainable prize, something more than he can ever hope to have achieved. And she is his. The most previous thing he has ever owned. To lose her would be to lose everything. Still struggling onward from the dreary little house in Elsternwick, he has gained much, but nothing so precious as this. He cannot afford to lose it. His jealousy, however indefensible in cold-blooded logical terms, is just s natural and as deeply embedded in his formative past as Cressida’s original honesty. For Cressida is Golden boy’s real laurel wreath.

Here, like Hedda Gabler, Anna Karenina or Helen of Troy, is material for an epic tragedy; but, though he understood the problem, Johnston could do little with it in fiction and little about it in life.

In 1963 in these depressing circumstances, he returned to his true subject matter, Australia, and the resurgence of energies produced his masterpiece My Brother Jack. Here he was able to project certain defective parts of his own personality on to Jack Meredith and Helen Midgeley as well as on to David, and so achieve an oblique self-criticism. The Johnstons’s financial position improved on their return to Australia, but after a brief efflorescence the new affection for home faded, the old emotional problems returned, and things went downhill fast.

The story of George Johnston haunts Australian culture because it is an exemplary one: he couldn’t find meaning in his life here, yet when he gave up his Australian subject matter, nothing replaced it. No fully satisfactory answer to this dilemma has yet to be found.

It’s very hard to write about human beings in decline, as Johnston himself found. Garry Kinnane handles his material with great understanding and sympathy. He works by common sense, not theory; lets the story tell itself rather than over-interpreting it; and leaves the reader to make his/her own judgments. All sorts of interesting facts, like Johnston being the first editor of Australian Post, emerge as the narrative tragedy carries you along to its bitter end.

Gillian Bouras married a Greek Australian, and her book begins as a sensitive study contrasting the two cultures. Australia is an easy-going, ‘advanced’ supermarket society, but George, the husband, wants his boys to endure something more than this:

He and I have endless arguments about the boys. He wants them to struggle. Until now, I have pointed out how limiting poverty, misery and fear are. Not that he wants to re-live his life, but he does want them to experience inconvenience, even hardship, and this is one reason he is glad he lives in rural Greece. Most of the Greek friends we left behind in the Melbourne of 1980 have given their children every comfort: the best schools, luxurious homes, swimming pools, expensive clothes, electronic playthings, trips abroad. One such child once asked where the Apollo Bay Hilton was.

But after the account of settling in rural Greece the main emphasis of A Foreign Wife subtly changes from contrasting the two cultures to asking whether cultures can in fact transplants, as the following incident shows. The sons become Greek Orthodox and say to their Protestant mother:

‘…You know you’re a heretic?’

‘Yep. Good thing. Should be more of us.’

‘But we four are all going to Paradise and you’ll be left behind, you see, because you’re not right.’

(And here I thought migration would be a mind-broadening experience.)

The upshot is that Gillian Bouras realises that there is an almost unbridgeable gulf between her views and those of Yiayia, her mother-in-law, the other strong character in the book. This is a potentially interesting situation, but in order to survive in the village the author voluntarily withdraws her own views. This is a sensible compromise; however, the diplomatic stasis which ensues hides rather than reveals the tensions to the reader. The husband George, a potential mediator who inhabits both cultures, disappears as a character, and the book consists in the end of a beautifully drawn background in search of a backbone.