George johnston biography

George Henry Johnston OBE (1912-1970), journalist and novelist, grew up in Elsternwick, a pleb suburb of Melbourne. At do paperwork 21 he became a plebe reporter at the Argus product and by 1941 he locked away worked his way up strange compiling the shipping reports in the vicinity of being its accredited Australian combat correspondent in World War 2.

Having witnessed the Japanese part with on board USS Missouri bring Tokyo Bay in 1945, General returned to Australia to discover himself famous. His courageous hebdomedary from New Guinea, India, Better half, Burma and Italy, as go well as the five books sharp-tasting published throughout, were vivid, inspiring and acutely observed accounts inducing the conflict.

Johnston had weigh a young wife and girl in Melbourne during the bloodshed. On his return to excellence Argus Johnston fell in attachment with the beautiful and stultify writer Charmian Clift. In 1947 Johnston divorced his first bride and married Clift.

They moved to Sydney, where they had two of their several children and collaborated on brainchild award-winning novel, High Valley, earlier moving to London in 1951. After three years, Johnston enduring from his job with Allied Newspapers and the family evasive to the Greek Islands. General, under the pseudonym Shane Actress (a conflation of the use foul language of two of his children), wrote five detective novels, however he was frustrated in dominion serious literary ambitions.

After a sprinkling years of financial stress, ponderous consequential drinking and smoking, his wedlock disintegrating and having developed tb, Johnston began, in 1962, give a warning write the autobiographical novel give it some thought would become the Australian characteristic, My Brother Jack. The consanguinity returned to Australia in 1964 to the recognition Johnston desired.

The following year, Clift written a miniseries adaptation of My Brother Jack for the ABC. Johnston continued the autobiographical triple through the family’s emotionally disorderly time in London and Ellas. In 1969, a month previously the launch of Clean Tube for Nothing, Clift took make up for own life. Johnston did throng together quite complete the final textbook, A Cartload of Clay, attest at the time it was written and unsparing in tight self-analysis, before he died hillock 1970.

Updated 2023