AustLit
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Image courtesy of publisher's website (Penguin Modern Classics edition) -
This image has been sourced from onlineSee full AustLit entry'Dante and Johnno are unlikely childhood friends, growing up in the bustle of steamy, wartime Brisbane. Later, as teenagers, they learn about love and life amidst the city's pubs and public libraries, backyards and brothels, Moreton Bay figs and tennis parties. As adults, they make the great pilgrimage overseas and maintain an uneasy friendship as they seek to build their lives.
'An affectionate and bittersweet portrait, Johnno brilliantly recreates the sleazy, tropical half-city that was Brisbane and captures a generation locked in combat with the elusive Australian dream.
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Michael Stanier's '"It's All Lies!": David Malouf's Johnno and Autobiography' was first presented as a paper at the Association for the Study of Australian Literature's sixteenth annual conference (3-8 July 1994), and then published in the association's journal, JASAL, as part of the conference proceedings.
Stanier's work interrogates the reading of autobiographies in post-colonial contexts: he says of this query, 'The text I am using to do this is David Malouf's Johnno, and I am drawn to it because I don't think it succeeds as a traditional autobiography and I want to know why.'
Michale Stanier's paper can be read in full via the National Library of Australia, at this link.
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Brian Dwyer's article (published in JASAL) argues
that landscape has always been central to the construction of gender in our war fiction, as it is essential to any attemps to re-define or to contest the prevailing gender ideology, with reference to Oliver Hogue's Trooper Bluegum at the Dardanelles, Gladys Adeline Hain's The Coo-ee Contingent, William Baylebridge's An Anzac Muster, D. H. Lawrence's Kangaroo and David Malouf's war novels.
While Malouf's work is not the sole focus of this piece, it does locate him within the broader context of Australian military fiction.
To read the article in full, follow this link.
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Reviewing Johnno in 1978, Epstein writes that
If there is nothing new under the sun, there are at least vast territories of differing local colors where the same things can happen. You can't get more antipodal than Australia, which is where the undisguised narrator grew up, and where this Bildungsroman, these rites of passage, take place.
To read the review in full, follow this link.
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