IN HIS BIOGRAPHY of the Australian author and war correspondent George Johnston, Garry Kinnane tells a story about his subject’s hatred of uppity manners and clothes. According to the story, Johnston and a colleague were invited to a musical evening by a fellow journalist at the Melbourne Argus in the late 1930s. The journalist ‘liked to maintain a high tone in such matters, insisting that the men wear black tie’. Johnston took the opportunity to bring the man down a peg or two. When the host opened the door, Johnston and his friend were both wearing lounge suits in defiance of his dress code. Quick as a flash, Johnston seized the man, whipped out a lipstick and scrawled ‘We love you Rupe’ on his starched shirt front, laughing as his victim shouted in protest. 

According to his biographer, this incident was only one of many in which Johnston revelled in taking the mickey out of snobs. Johnston was the son of a tram repairer who never finished high school, but he enjoyed a rapid rise at The Argus after beginning a cadetship there in 1933. In his autobiographical novel My Brother Jack (1964) – long considered a classic of Australian literature, almost photorealistic in its evocation of interwar life – Johnston’s alter ego, David Meredith, feels a gnawing social in-betweenness. On the one hand, he has separated himself from his working-class origins, but he feels different from his middle-class peers at the same time. Meredith also feels inadequate in the presence of his older brother, Jack, who exudes an easy masculine confidence. Modelled on Johnston’s real-life brother (also named Jack), Jack Meredith has a straight-talking working-class toughness, very different from his complex younger sibling. By telling that story in his biography, however, Kinnane was suggesting that the writer was less at odds with the major currents of Australian life than he realised: Johnston resisted formality, hated snobbery and nonchalantly passed off heteromasculine aggression as humour. Little wonder he became the golden boy of Australian letters, popular as well as critically acclaimed.