|
My dispatches were admired, syndicated, published abroad. If you
are given the privilege of having your name in the papers
every day, and on your own terms, deception and
self-aggrandisement are easy arts to practise. (MBJ 335)
After joining the Argus in 1933 Johnston had worked under a
succession of editors: R. L. Curthoys, who had hired him, W.
P. Hurst, E. G. Bonney, and from 1942 E. A. (Ted) Doyle.1
Alec Chisholm had been Managing Director until 1937, when he
was succeeded by Errol Knox. Knox presided, indeed was
something of a dictator, over editorial matters for the
remainder of Johnston's time on the paper. Johnston drew
on several of these editorial mentors for the character of
the tough-talking newspaper boss Bernard Brewster in the
Meredith trilogy. According to Greeba Jamison, who had
joined the paper as a reporter in 1939, Brewster bears some
physical resemblance to Ted Doyle, but in terms of his
relations with David Meredith there are characteristics of
Curthoys, Doyle and Knox in him. Of these, it was Knox who
had the greatest influence over Johnston's career. Bruce
Kneale says he was Knox's clear favourite of all the
journalists working under him, and it was commonly known
that under his patronage Johnston was destined for higher
things.2 If he could make a success of a war
correspondent's job, it would be an important step in his
career.
While waiting in the last days of 1941 to hear whether the jobs
would be offered to him, George hurried to finish the proofs
of Australia at War. Plans for a Christmas edition had been
delayed by a dearth of binders, though Angus &
Robertson,
who were enthusiastic about the script and confident it
would 'be a winner' 3 were eager to get the book
out. Reflecting the research that had gone into it, this
book was Johnston's most ambitious piece of writing so
far. In Part One there is an account of the state of
Australia's war preparations throughout the country and the
kind of training each corps was undergoing. It also looks
briefly at the contribution being made by private industry.
Part Two praises the toughness and courage of Australian
soldiers in action in the Middle East, and at such places as
Bardia and Crete. Johnston had no qualms about inflating
Australian heroism to mythic proportions. He writes of an
infantryman 'having the figure of a Greek god', and of
'youngsters from the world's youngest civilization' marching
'into the land of the world's oldest civilization',4
terms that have an intentional suggestion of epic about
them. The descriptions of action have all the headlong
ardour, and all the triteness, of Boy's Own Annual stuff:
Hour after hour its [the AIF's] remaining units held the ridge
against the great waves of German infantry. Below them
hundreds of their comrades were wading out to the waiting
ships. The time limit given by the Navy had expired. The
ships were
beginning to
move away
across the
blue Mediterranean. The gallant rearguard, its ranks sadly
thinned now, its ammunition almost gone, did not look back.
They had nothing to hope for now ... nothing but death or
imprisonment. Still the guns snapped and barked at the
advancing Germans. Still the ridge was held.5
Repeatedly, connections with World War I are made, so that this
conflict is seen as 'the story of a young nation's manhood
that began at Gallipoli [and] had gone into a second
volume'.6 How well his upbringing in that
patriotic house, with that obsessively war-conscious father,
fitted him to write things like this! The belief was deeply
instilled into him that the full status of Australian
manhood was somehow tied to the dark forces of blood
sacrifice, and that it was the sacred duty of the succeeding
generation to attain its maturity by a re-enactment of the
same heroics that initiated its fathers. Nor was this an
individual rite: the whole nation, in the minds of the many
Australians who were in the thrall of this myth, was being
given the opportunity to prove its mettle to the world.
Johnston held these beliefs in such a way that, whatever changes
he underwent in later life — and this included becoming
an outspoken pacifist in his last years, when 'the Vietnam
war was on — he was never able to view those succeeding
generations of World War I and II participants with anything
but awe. He never became ironical about them. In his most
serious moments, such as his writing of My Brother Jack, in
which the whole vision of the novel is framed by the two
wars, his respect for those who fought is profound. In
1956, in long, serious conversations with Sidney Nolan, he
was to talk with such eloquence about the war and its mythic
significance that he inspired Nolan to paint his Gallipoli
series.7
Yet Johnston did not choose to place himself in that heroic role.
Again, this was always a matter for self-denigration with
him. That praise of Australian heroism is invariably
accompanied by the kind of painful sense of failure that is
so characteristic of David Meredith when he is confronted
by the reality of the initiation that men like his brother
are undergoing, but which he has, to his own cost,
forgone, as he confesses in My Brother Jack:
And the anguish inside me had twisted and turned into an awful and
irremediable sense of loss, and I thought of Dad and the
putteed men coming off the Ceramic, and I thought of Jack
when I had seen him at Puckapunyal five long years before,
looking just like these men, hard and strong and confident
and with his brown legs planted in the Seymour dust as if
the whole world was his to conquer, a man fulfilled in his
own rightness, and suddenly and terribly I knew that all the
Jacks were marching past me, all the Jacks were still marching....
(MBJ
378)
This sort of writing is, of course, a lifetime away from Australia
at War, which contains almost nothing of Johnston's personal
experience, and thus nothing of this anguish, which in any
case took years to accumulate. It does have the same respect
for the Australian soldier, and the same tendency to place
him in the kind of mythic context that echoed the feelings
of a whole era of Australians struggling to establish the
nation's identity. Moreover, the fact that Johnston did not
participate in the sacrificial aspect of that struggle
probably became a compelling reason for his talking and
writing about it in such glorified terms.
Johnston did get the war correspondent job. Errol Knox appointed
him in late January 1942, and on 4 February he was issued
with the first accredited war correspondent's licence for a
newspaperman to cover a war in Australia. Osmar White, who
wrote for the Melbourne Herald, remembers: 'He beat me to the
barracks and got number one licence, and I got number two.'8
Johnston's dispatches were to be published by the Argus,
Adelaide Advertiser and Sydney Morning Herald group, though
articles of his were also to be published from time to time
in the Age, the London Daily Telegraph and Time and
Life
magazines in New York. Five days after his licence was
issued, he was handed a uniform, given an honorary ranking
as captain, paid £59 15s 9d in lieu of holidays and posted
to Port Moresby. He was to receive a briefing at HQ in
Townsville before flying in.9
|
|
| War
Correspondent Licence (Top right-Number of Licence -
1) |
Captain
(Hon.) George H. Johnston |
The Japanese attack on New Guinea had begun about a month before
this. By the time Johnston arrived, Rabaul had fallen and
Port Moresby was the only defence base standing between the
Japanese and the Australian mainland. Singapore fell only
a few days after he landed. There was, therefore, plenty
of action to report and considerable danger in doing so. His
arrival date was Friday, 13 February, and he wrote in the
notebook, which he immediately began to keep: 'Ominous date,
but arrived safely.'10 He might well have thanked his luck:
the Lockheed aircraft that had flown him and Osmar White to
New Guinea crashed in a Cairns swamp on the way back,
killing both pilots.
The scene that confronted him in Port Moresby was chaotic. There
had just been a bombing raid, and most of the Europeans had
been evacuated. Not content with enemy damage, Australian
troops had just looted the town, including the local
museum, from which they had 'souvenired' valuable artefacts.
The Australian 39th and 53rd battalions, poorly equipped and
untrained for the kind of warfare they were about to wage
against a well-equipped and successful Japanese army,
inspired little confidence. On top of all this, the heat,
sandflies, appalling mosquitoes, bad water and food, all
conspired to give war correspondents such as Johnston a
testing baptism.11
 |
|
| George
Johnston - Somewhere in New Guinea |
George
Johnston - Somewhere in New Guinea |
He could not relate such dismal information back to his paper.
Censorship was strict, often unnecessarily so, a matter of
constant annoyance to the correspondents. Johnston recorded
in his notebook many details that the censor would not have
passed: incidents of desertion, for instance, and troop and
artillery statistics and movements, as well as the
destructive effects of Japanese air raids. He also recorded
the shooting of a Lutheran missionary by an Australian
soldier, after it was discovered that the missionary had
helped the Japanese. In fact this notebook had a strict
purpose. It was not a true diary, although it was recently
published as such; it contains no personal information, and
many of its entries are not of witnessed events, but are
based on hearsay, and frequently of doubtful accuracy.
It is likely that Johnston intended to get a book out of New Guinea
from the moment he knew he was going there, and that the
'diary' was simply the formula upon which to base it. Much
space is given to colourful anecdote: stories of heroism,
humour and mateship among the men, and horror tales of
shocking injuries and mutilated bodies. A common one, which
stuck in his mind for years afterwards, involved troops
moving along the Kokoda trail giving a shake to a severed
hand wedged in a tree beside the track. Another incident,
which he remembered in his last months of life, was hearing
that Japanese soldiers kept their fingernail clippings in
tiny urns to be sent back to their relatives if they were
killed. Odd details such as these he remembered long after
the standard wartime heroics had faded from his mind.12
Many
of them went into the notebook in preparation for his New
Guinea Diary book.
During the first four months in New Guinea he sent back more than
seventy articles, mostly on the rescue work of pilots, the
heroism of ground staff, relations with the natives and
between Australian and American troops. He also wrote pieces
on the enemy that are notable for their grasp of Japanese
competence at a time when a fatuous brand of racism among
the Australian public caused many to underrate dangerously
the ability of the Japanese. Nevertheless, like most
correspondents, he deliberately painted a rosier picture of
the allied campaign than was true at the time in the
interests of maintaining morale at home.
Johnston returned to Melbourne in June, and was temporarily
replaced in New Guinea by Geoffrey Hutton. Elsie may have
put pressure either on him or the office for his return, for
relations between them were under some strain. According
to Bruce Kneale, it was becoming increasingly obvious that
the Johnstons were drifting apart. 'George was taking giant
strides in developing himself, while Elsie was standing
still,' he observes.13 Rumours were flying about the
Argus
office that Johnston was having an affair with one of the
office girls.
When Johnston returned to Moresby in September it was obvious to
Osmar White that he was withdrawn and tense. He confided to
White that he had grown bored with his marriage. His
popularity among the other correspondents was low, too,
although this was more to do with his attitude to the work
than anything else. His undisguised ambition and
competitiveness engendered wariness among his colleagues
in the correspondents' mess. 'He was not', says White, 'a
good sharer of information. If George went off to see the
General [whereas] most of the other blokes would say what
the hell he was saying, George wouldn't tell you: he was not
prepared to. He was after the beat, which made him a damn
good newspaperman.'14
 |
 |
|
George
Johnston (seated) - Somewhere in South Pacific |
George
Johnston (right) - Somewhere in South Pacific
|
White had been to the Kokoda area with photographer Damien Parer
and correspondent Chester Wilmot, and, despite the danger
of such a mission, they did not mind keeping up the
tradition of sharing information with those correspondents
who, like Johnston, preferred to operate from base.
According to White there was no resentment or charges of
cowardice levelled at Johnston for adopting this approach:
He decided to play it that way, and I think he was probably quite
right to play it that way ... I think he felt he
could serve
his newspaper better by staying far enough away from it to
get the whole picture. It was a point of view that I came
around to very much later in Europe — that sometimes when
you got terribly close to it you couldn't see the wood for
the trees. You had to spend at least part of the time back
where the intelligence people could tell you what was going
on.15
Nevertheless, the possibility that he could be rightly
accused of
cowardice was one that haunted Johnston for years after the
war. The corollary to not enlisting was that war
correspondence work would always have the stigma of evasion
attached to it, and later in his life he became a harsh
critic, not only of his own role as a war correspondent, but
of the very nature of the exercise.
In the latter half of 1942 the allied forces had a number of
successes in New Guinea, and Johnston, like his colleagues,
gave a glorified account of the Australian and American
campaigns.
In his notebook, however, he again recorded comments that
would not have passed the censors, particularly about the
Americans. When General Douglas MacArthur arrived in
October, Johnston wrote:
Oct. 3rd. MacArthur up on the track (Kokoda) today; only as far as
the road went through!
Oct. 16th. Everyone is incensed with
the new censorship bans, including MacArthur's personal
censorship of stories of his visit here which have been
slashed to convey the impression (a) that he went right up
to the front line (which he certainly did NOT) and (b) that
this was NOT his first visit to New Guinea. Censorship now
is just plain Gestapo stuff!
Along with many Australians who knew the truth, Johnston was
angered by American attempts to take full credit for saving
Australia from the Japanese:
Nov. 12th. The fact remains that no American ground
soldier has
fired a shot in this campaign so far, but there is a
widespread tendency for many Americans to decry the
Australian efforts and perpetrate rumours that the A.I.F.
is only opposed by a handful of Japanese — 90 or 250. One
American was asked today if the hundreds of wounded
Australians coming in had been in traffic accidents!
In fact American efforts were often marked by confusion and
incompetence:
Dec. 12th. Yesterday, for the sixth time,
American bombers dropped bombs on their own positions,
killing two and wounding six.
Johnston omitted incidents of
this kind when he put together the book based on his
notebook, called New Guinea Diary, which he set to work on
immediately when he got back to Melbourne. Like its
predecessors, this book was aimed at the popular market,
confining itself almost entirely to action and feats of
heroism.
|
|
|
(L-R)
Ian Mitchell (London Daily Express), John Grover
(Associated Press of America) & George
Johnston |
George returned from his New Guinea duties five days before
Christmas 1942, and was immediately granted a month's leave.
To Elsie he seemed tired and unsettled, as if he always
wanted to be somewhere other than where he was. The strain
between them was not helped by an unwelcome surprise that
came in the mail for Elsie one day. A letter arrived
containing an opened love-letter from Johnston, posted
from Brisbane to the girl in the Argus office. Some third
person in the office had intercepted the letter and
redirected it to Elsie, by way of informing on Johnston.
Elsie confronted him with it, but he shrugged it off as a
trivial flirtation. Intent on saving her marriage, Elsie
phoned the girl, arranged a meeting, which ended amicably,
and the affair petered out.16 Johnston still seemed
unsettled, however, and agreed to every office request to
travel about. He relieved Geoffrey Hutton in Brisbane for
six weeks in February. When he returned in March, he was
back barely a week when he agreed to another assignment,
this time a substantial one. He was to accompany the Federal
Attorney-General and Minister for External Affairs, Dr H. V.
Evatt, on a diplomatic tour of the United States. Elsie
greeted the news with dismay: again she would be left on her
own with Gae, and with few indications of support from
Johnston's family. Amid the bustle of getting away, Johnston
telegraphed Angus & Robertson 'unable to complete
galleys of New Guinea Diary'. Cousins managed the
corrections, and the book came out in mid-1943, while
Johnston was away. He left Melbourne on 1 April, arriving in
San Francisco with the Evatt entourage on 8 April.
 |
 |
George
Johnston (3rd from left) - near Alice Springs
Northern Territory, Australia |
George
Johnston (right) at 'Devils Marbles' 400k north of
Alice Springs
Northern Territory, Australia |
Johnston's movements over the following eight months are
unfortunately obscure. He wrote few letters home and seems to
have been deliberately secretive about much that happened
during this time. He was certainly in Washington in May, and
either there or in New York had a warm reunion with his old
friend Sam Atyeo, in the company of Evatt. The improbable
Atyeo had been appointed personally by Evatt to the Australian
War Supplies Procurement Office in Washington, and whenever
Evatt visited the States he spent some time with Atyeo, whose
company delighted him. Johnston and Atyeo talked over old
times as Gallery students, and generally got along well
together. Unfortunately, Evatt and Johnston did not. At some
stage they had a 'furious row', says Geoffrey Hutton,17 and
when the Evatt party left the country in June, Johnston was no
longer with it. Elsie believes it had something to do with an
American woman called Jane, with whom Johnston had become
involved to the point of neglecting his journalistic duties.
Up until that point, relations between Evatt and Johnston
had been good: Evatt had written an Introduction to his latest
book, The Toughest Fighting in the World, an American version
of New Guinea Diary, in which he gives high praise to
Johnston's work in New Guinea. The details of what went wrong
between them have not yet come to light.
Johnston wrote to Elsie on 20 August, saying that he had 'stayed on
... writing a book on Australia, including the effects of
Americans on Australians'. This book was eventually
published in 1944 exclusively in the United States as Pacific
Partner. He was also producing articles for Saturday Evening
Post, Life and Collier's magazines, mostly on New Guinea
subjects, including a portrait of MacArthur for Life that
amounts to an astonishing piece of whitewashing, after the
comments he recorded in his New Guinea notebook. Among other
things, he excuses MacArthur's failure to give proper
recognition to the Australian fighting efforts:
There was some resentment among several war correspondents who
insisted that MacArthur was trying to convert what was a
purely Australian ground victory into a combined success. This
was actually unjust. At that time it was important to prevent
the Japanese from knowing that the Americans were being kept
intact as a separate force to be flown into the north-coast
areas for the final assault on Buna.18
This might have warmed American hearts, but it would have made some
Australian blood boil. Johnston had been, after all, one of
those correspondents who objected to the way in which
MacArthur promoted the image of American troops at the expense
of the Australians.
|
|
|
|
George
Johnston (right) at Adelaide River,
115K South of Darwin - Northern Territory, Australia |
George
Johnston (left) at Central Mt. Stuart,
200K North of Alice Springs - Northern Territory,
Australia |
The glossy American journals were, according to Geoffrey Hutton,
'mad keen to get him',19 and since he was writing for them as
a freelance, the fees, generous by Australian standards, were
going into his own pocket. He told colleagues that he had made
thousands of dollars in America, and spent them all in the New
York night clubs, presumably with Jane. Certainly Elsie knew
nothing about such money. Johnston's relationship with Jane
was hardly covert, although her surname is unknown. He
introduced friends and colleagues to her as his girl-friend,
and Geoffrey Hutton recalls that she was 'exactly like his
wife', although 'not overloaded with intellect'.20 Johnston
later used her name for the heroine of the novel The Far Face
of the Moon (1964), but whether there is any further
resemblance between them it is not possible to say. The
fictional Jane is a virtual nymphomaniac.
During the last half of 1943 Johnston's letters home became so rare
that Elsie sought an explanation from the Diplomatic Service.
They had none, but agreed to include her mail in the official
bag to ensure their safe arrival. Still she received no
replies to her letters. She went to Ted Doyle at the Argus
office, but he had no news either. Doyle had expected Johnston
home in September, along with Errol Knox (now a Brigadier)
and his son-in-law, Major Henry Steele, who had been visiting
the States. Finally, Elsie received a letter in November
from him saying that Knox and Steele had been transferred to
a faster ship in Panama, and that he had been forced to remain
'still ploughing along' in a cargo ship. But Elsie believed
that the real reason for his delay was his reluctance to leave
Jane.
Indeed, when he finally arrived home in December, he could talk of
nothing but Jane. He assailed Elsie 'on the couch one morning,
and told me about this Jane, and that he wanted to divorce me
and go back to her'.21 Rows and bitter accusations followed,
and Johnston went into moods of black depression. He even
threatened suicide, and left a note in his trouser pocket for
Elsie to discover to the effect that he had been found dead
somewhere. His despair grew partly out of the knowledge that
the affair, which had been as much with America itself as with
Jane, could not be renewed. Nevertheless, it brought matters
to a climax with Elsie, and within days after his return he
decided that they should separate. He terminated the lease at
Mackie Grove, and found a flat in East St Kilda for Elsie and
Gae. For the time being he was going to stay at a hotel.
He didn't last long, however. Three days before Christmas he moved
into the flat with them, and so the turmoil of uncertainty
continued. If he was unhappy at home, Johnston was more
exuberant and popular than ever at the office. He sought the
centre of attention, and played the raconteur at every
opportunity, as Greeba Jamison recalls:
He would burst into the big reporter's room, described in
perfect detail in My Brother Jack, and the whole place was
turned on end, particularly for the girl reporters. He would
snatch up the best-looking one he saw, grab her on his knee or
swing her up towards the ceiling and catch her in his arms;
everyone, men and women, would cluster round and George would
tell us with tremendous gusto, a spate of exaggerated
adjectives generously sprinkled with bloody (one of his
favourite words), great gusts of laughter, of his exploits in
the war, Very Important People he had met, women he had made
love to. Usually we would repair to the Duke of Kent hotel
across the road in LaTrobe Street and the story would continue
over many rounds of beer. 22
This was very much the Johnston that his colleagues saw: 'the
complete extrovert', wrote Geoffrey Hutton, with whom he was
sharing an office, 'with inexhaustible talent for making
friends'.23 It was about this time, too, that he began
acquiring the tag 'golden boy', in reference to his fair
colouring and the favour of the Argus hierarchy. Bruce Kneale
says that it was he who gave him the name, not least because
everything he touched seemed to turn to success.24 His
marriage was an obvious exception to this.
From America Johnston had sent Angus & Robertson the typescript
of his first attempt at a novel, entitled 'The Sun Rose
Twice', but when he got back he requested its return, with the
intention of rewriting it. It never reappeared. Instead, he
worked on a new book, about his American experiences, which
turned out to be a problematical homage to Jane, provisionally
titled 'Hey Listen, Jezebel!' This sets out to be a humorous
sequence of anecdotes of an ingenuous Australian's encounter
with the sophisticated world of wartime New York. The script
was finished by February 1944, and Angus & Roberston
agreed to publish it under the alternative title of
Skyscrapers in the Mist, although it was to be another two
years before it finally came out, after a great deal of
equivocation. One story it contains has a premonitory touch:
It is said, though I cannot corroborate the story, that the bar [of
a New York restaurant] carried a sign copied from a London
taproom announcement of the early eighteenth century: 'Drunk
for a cent. Dead drunk for two cents, Clean straw for nothing'.25
Twenty years later this grim little epigram would
have a special significance for him.
Johnston discovered early in 1944 that he would be going abroad
again, and wrote a rather depressed note to W. C. Cousins on
28 January, saying, 'pushing off in a month ... to India,
Burma, Africa and then to the U.S., and will be away probably
two years or so'. For some reason he wanted his absence 'to be
kept confidential as far as Sydney newspaper circles go'.26 He
added that he hoped to get a 'real rip-snorter of a book' out of
this trip.
Once more Johnston's departure was in haste. He wrote to Cousins
from Perth requesting that all royalty cheques be paid to
Elsie, and also to send her the proofs of Skyscrapers in the
Mist for correction. This was an odd thing to do. She had
never proofread anything before, and had no idea what was
required. More important, as she read through the proofs she
discovered that she did not like the book in the least,
neither its subject-matter nor its flippant tone. So she
simply sent it back to Angus & Robertson, telling them as
much and leaving the corrections to them. Elsie wondered,
however, whether the gesture of giving her some part to play
in the book might not have been George's way of making a peace
offering, of putting the whole Jane affair in the context of
his great discovery of America, so that it might at least
seem more understandable to her, if not more forgivable. In
her circumstances, optimism was Elsie's best refuge.
|
|
 |
|
George
Johnston In Burma |
George
Johnston somewhere in the South Pacific |
Again Johnston's movements abroad are difficult to trace; he
travelled about so frequently that it is possible to give only
an outline for most of the time, though occasionally specific
details of his activities in Asia are clear. His first address
was the Army Public Relations Office at South-East Command in
New Delhi, and from this base he was to make regular trips by
air and road to surrounding regions affected by the war during
most of 1944. His official brief was a roving commission,
which meant that he could generally decide for himself the
areas from which he would correspond. The many articles (over
150) that he sent back to the Argus and other
publications
from the Asian region formed the basis of a comprehensive
book, which he was to put together at the end of the war and
call Journey through Tomorrow. This book provides the best
guide to the events in his life during 1944-45. It was an
important two years for Johnston, because of the range and
newness of experience that Asia was to provide him with.
Johnston spent March and April in Ceylon and India relaxing,
after which he went to Burma to report on the bitter fighting
in the northern town of Myitkyina and the Mogaung Valley area
generally, where the bid to recapture Burma was under way.
Reading his reports, one is struck by his broad view of the
correspondent's role. Unlike the war books he had so far
written, he did not confine himself to racy descriptions of
action and heroism. In fact he did little of this from now on.
Instead, he wrote on the many human touches he observed, such
as the effects on the civilian population, or the behaviour of
soldiers when they were not fighting. He sent back to the
Argus pieces on the Kachins (the native head-hunters of North
Burma), on Burmese national pride, on Australian soldiers
playing two-up, and on the way the arrival of a monsoon
brought the fighting to a halt. He was appalled by the wanton
destruction of local culture, and especially the brutal
disregard by Americans for Burmese sacred objects:
 |
 |
| George
Johnston at 'Huating Buddhist Temple' in the Western
Mountains near Kunming, China |
When I first arrived at Namkam, not far from the Chinese border,
it was almost noon and I stopped to eat my luncheon ration
alongside a large temple, almost completely destroyed by
bombing. Like most Burmese places of worship it was a gimcrack
structure of corrugated iron and hideous fretwork, now jumbled
into a heap of tangled wreckage. Curiously, the holy images
were untouched — a number of miniature Buddhas and three
huge Buddhas sitting back to back. An hour later the Americans
arrived and went to work with tyre levers and hammers. By
nightfall the three large Buddhas had been beheaded and all
the smaller Buddhas ripped from their pedestals.27
Elsewhere he makes the point that the Japanese during their
occupation of Burma showed considerable respect for the local
culture, and did not generally practise this kind of
desecration.
In June Johnston flew to China for the first time, travelling via
the dangerous route across the Himalayas in northern Assam
known as 'the hump'. He entered a description of it in his
notebook as 'A mass of twisting ravines and sharp-fanged
peaks, it had always been something real and personal, and
oddly malignant, to hundreds of pilots flying into China'.28
He was to fly 'the hump' many times in the next sixteen
months, and was always to find it frightening.
|
|
| George
Johnston (Left) near Kunming |
Most of his time in China was spent in the western provinces of
Szechwan and Yunnan, specifically in the cities of Kunming and
Chungking. Kunming, on a high plateau at the end of the Burma
Road, had so far managed to escape the ravages of the war and
to preserve its beautiful medieval character. By contrast,
Chungking consisted almost entirely of newly built temporary
shacks, and had a particularly uncomfortable climate. It was
the wartime capital of Republican China, and had been bombed
so often that the authorities had given up attempts at
permanent reconstruction. It was here that Chiang Kai-shek
made his headquarters for his direction of the Chinese war
effort. Johnston writes about unexpectedly coming across him
one day:
... towards evening I saw a huge sedan black and glistening,
draw up beside a dried-up parkland which extended from one of
Chungking's dusty streets to a similar dusty street on a
higher level. A small man stepped out. He was wearing a simple
khaki suit of some light material with flat buttons of brass.
The big car drove away, and the little man strolled alone in
the park with his head bent thoughtfully and his hands clasped
behind his back. I knew who he was, although I had never seen
him before, and he looked much smaller and older than I would
have imagined. Moreover, he did not look like a soldier; more
like a scholar or a professor worried by taxation demands. He
had a quiet, intelligent face heavily lined. I looked at the
lonely little figure as he walked gently uphill and stepped
into the shining car again at the higher road. It was my first
sight of Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek.29
The incident prompted Johnston to think about Chinese politics. He
sent the Argus a piece titled 'China's Political
Problems',30
in which he discusses Chiang's peculiar grip on power, and his
obsessiveness and obstinacy, while at the same time defending
his dictatorship as a necessary means of uniting China against
Japan. He also points out the considerable support for
Chiang among the Chinese people and their provincial leaders.
This was the first time Johnston had attempted to write
seriously on political matters, and it is interesting that it
was not politics as such that triggered his interest but the
incongruous sight of that small frail figure commanding such
immense power. The novelist in him was responding to the human
aspect of the drama he was observing.
 |
 |
| George
Johnston on Sampan on Main Canal, Kunming |
Main
Canal - Kunming, China |
In September Johnston witnessed an event that touched him deeply.
The people of Kweilin learned of a Japanese advance on their
city, and they fled in their hundreds of thousands south along
the road to Liuchow. As it happened there was also a famine in
the country, and thousands of refugees died along the way.
Johnston took a jeep along the Kweilin/Liuchow road and was
staggered. 'Imagine', he wired the Argus:
the entire population of Melbourne abandoning their homes and
taking to the roads in flight from the city.... On the road
south to Liuchow struggles a constant procession of
wooden-wheeled pony carts, water buffaloes, decrepit trucks,
wheelbarrows, rickshaws
and sedan
chairs. Already thousands of refugees have died by the
sides of the road, where the bodies of old men and women,
cripples and children are rotting in the hot sun.31
As a
child, the sight of the single corpse in the lounge-room of
his home had disturbed him. Consider the effect of seeing
thousands of them in such terrible circumstances. Throughout
his life he was to talk and write of this event.
In October 1944 Johnston set out on a three-month trip to Europe
— his first. This turned out to be a 12,000-mile tour that
began in the Middle East and took in Italy, Greece and
Jugoslavia, transport by courtesy of the US Air Force. He did
not write much about this trip, indeed the only piece
published
by the Argus at this time was a defence of communism in
southern Europe. 'Almost always', he wrote, 'it is a
spontaneous
expression of feeling that comes from people who have suffered
and are suffering still, rather than emanating from a clever,
calculated indoctrination.'32 He spiced this with a swipe at
democracy for its indifference to the poor. Five years later,
in the Cold War climate, the Argus would not have printed such
views, but during the war the communists were on our side, so
it was allowed to stand. He wrote, too, that when he was in
Athens he could see 'hints of future bitterness and unrest'
between the Greek political factions. He could hardly have
imagined at this time how significant this country would
become later in his life.
Most of the three months of this trip of Johnston's was spent in
Rome, where he was loosely attached to a US Press contingent,
with accommodation provided by the US Air Force. He probably
was not happy there. No articles appeared by him at this time,
but he did write a story that suggests he was lonely and
homesick. His central character, Barrington, has a brief
affair with an Italian woman whom he meets in a jewellery shop
while buying a mosaic bracelet for his wife back home. The
language barrier between Barrington and the woman intensifies
his feelings of alienation in Rome. He considers writing to
his wife about the affair, but in the end decides that she
would not understand, and keeps it from her. Johnston gave the
story the title 'Roman Mosaic', but he did not send it off for
publication straight away. Possibly he thought of it as a
draft, and wanted to tinker with it some more.
Johnston left Rome in January 1945, and flew back to Burma,
arriving in time to report on the Allied advance to re-open
the Burma Road. His articles tell of the huge quantities of
war supplies that could now be pushed into China along the
Burma Road, and the successful repulse of the Japanese forces
that followed. K. E. I. Wallace-Crabbe, who was then a
squadron leader in the RAF, recalls seeing him in Burma about
this time:
[it was] at a place called Maymyo, about one third of the way up
the Burma Road to the Chinese border of Wanting . .. The night
before, our location had been severely bombed in an attempt by
the Japanese to 'collect' either Generalissimo Kai-shek or the
U.S. General 'vinegar Joe' Stillwell. In our partly wrecked
building, and the few remaining bungalows in the smashed
courtyard, we were a strange, mixed collection. Suddenly a
superbly uniformed U.S. war correspondent intruded. To my
surprise it was George Johnston. He said he had come by air
from Chungking, and had with him a staggering collection of
watercolours he had painted in different war areas of China.33
None of these pictures seems to have survived. He evidently kept up
his sketching and painting wherever he was, and he used some
to illustrate feature articles on New Guinea and Asian topics
in American magazines, such as Collier's and Saturday Evening
Post.
By March 1945 the Burma campaign had been successfully completed
and Burma and India made safe for the Allies. As things cooled
down, Johnston's interest wandered increasingly away from
war matters. He had not seen much of India to this stage, so
he rectified this by making an extraordinary tour by train
across the northern breadth of the country, taking in
Calcutta, Delhi, Benares, Jaipur, the Punjab, and then on to
Kashmir and Afghanistan. This journey gave him the chance to
write the sort of journalism he most liked: feature articles,
which the Argus placed in the Weekend Supplement. In these
he writes with great enthusiasm for the country and its
people, and covers such matters as the influence of the
English, poverty and the caste system, Indian bureaucracy, and
a conversation about cricket with the Maharajah of Patiala.
Fascinating though it all was, he ended the tour thoroughly
exhausted, and when he returned to HQ in April he was sent
home on a month's leave. He was in Melbourne by 20 April,
fourteen months after his departure.
At home, Elsie was still nagged by the problem, now assuming the
proportions of a saga, of the proofs of Skyscrapers in the
Mist. Angus & Robertson had refused to correct them and
had redirected them to her. She then wrote to W. G. Cousins,
making her views on the book clear:
Dear Mr. Cousins,
May I
write frankly to you? I do NOT like Skyscrapers in the
Mist!'
In my opinion it is not right to waste precious paper on such
a subject .. . Australia does not want second-rate novels, and
to my way of thinking Skyscrapers in the Mist is one. Also,
after the reputation Mr. Johnston has built for himself, I
think he would be very foolish to spoil it with this book ...
34
She added that Johnston had himself expressed doubts about the book
(which is not a novel) in a letter to her. Even so, in his
tiredness he was hardly in a mood to quibble or to carry out a
substantial rewrite of something so far in the past, so he
simply corrected the proofs himself and returned them to Angus
& Robertson for publication. It would take another year
for it to come out.
Up until this point Johnston had published no fiction, though he
clearly was eager to do something with 'Roman Mosaic'. Bruce
Kneale, who was now magazine editor of the Argus, tells how
Johnston asked him in the office one day about the stories
Kneale wrote and published in various magazines. 'Hey, sport,'
he said to Kneale, 'tell us how you go about writing a story,
what do you do?' They talked about it, and next day Kneale was
astonished when Johnston slapped a story on his desk and said:
'There you are — read that and tell me if it's any good.'
Kneale read it and was impressed. Indeed, he thought it was
too good for the Argus magazine, and advised him to send it to
one of the big American journals.35 What Johnston did not tell
him was that he had written a draft of the story in Rome over
the winter, though he did tell Kneale that it was based on an
experience he had had. Kneale still thinks of the occasion as
an example of Johnston's remarkable facility — asking how
to write a story one day, and offering the finished product
for publication the next! 'Roman Mosaic' appeared sixteen
months later in Collier's magazine, and was his first piece of
published fiction since his school-magazine days.
Relations with Elsie seem to have been cordial enough during this
month of leave, but the fact that Johnston would soon be off
again may have prompted a kind of truce between them. Before
he departed, however, an event occurred which, though nobody
could have known it at the time, was profoundly to change
the course of his life. One lunchtime he was holding forth to
a group of friends and colleagues in the Australia Hotel, when
Bruce Kneale came up to him and said: 'I've got someone here
who wants to meet you.'36 There, beaming at him, was the most
astonishingly beautiful AW AS lieutenant he had ever seen. Her
name was Charmian Clift, she was interested in writing, she
knew exactly who Johnston was and what he had done as a war
correspondent, and she was herself the Editor of the Ordnance
Corps magazine, For Your Information, at the Albert Park
barracks. The three of them, Kneale, Johnston and Clift, all
in Army uniform, sat in the Australia Hotel all afternoon
talking. It was not long before Kneale could see sparks of
mutual attraction flying between Johnston and Clift. However,
it went no farther at that time. Whatever feelings they may
have felt had to be suppressed, because Johnston was leaving
shortly for Asia again. He departed on 19 May 1945, but no
doubt he had carefully filed away in his memory the name and
whereabouts of Lieutenant Clift for future reference.
Johnston flew to India, and almost immediately went back into
China. For the next two months he shuttled frequently between
his familiar haunts of Kunming and Chungking. He knew them
both so well by this time that he could write detailed
descriptions that vividly evoked the contrasting characters of
the two cities. Of Chungking, with its extremes of climate and
terrain, he wrote:
Huge cellars open up from the footpaths of the main streets and
looking down one sees precipitous warrens of clustered huts
and hovels falling away hundreds of feet down the
boulder-strewn slopes on which the pavements surprisingly
rest. It is like opening up a trapdoor in a street that
outwardly appears normal and seeing down below, instead of a
cellar, a whole suburban area standing on end!
 |
 |
| Street
market in Kunming, Western China |
Young
girl labourers near Kunming, Western China |
During the ghastly period of the air-raids, Chungking's clammy fogs
gave the city protection for seven months of the year, and the
terrain for the remaining five months provided the sheltering
tunnels and the cave shelters burrowed for miles beneath the
great crags — provided also the cave hospitals, cave
schools, cave factories, cave arsenals. Here for years of
suffering and hardship such as even London never knew the
battered population lived like troglodytes.37
Kunming, on the other hand, the centre of business and situated on
a fertile plateau, is personified as:
... a fat voluptuary, sensuous, rouged, heavy with jewels and
sprawling on a sheet of fine satin that had become soiled and
frayed.
Few, if any, cities in all China so swiftly absorbed
modernism
and the paraphernalia of the Western World. The Burma Road and
the smuggler's trails out of Tibet, the roads frequented by
the secret operators of the opium ring, all led to Kunming ...
One would see the fat profiteers and parasites and the men in
beggar's rags dying or dead in the muddied streets.38
Johnston's style of writing here has reached a degree of
definition. There is a confidence and energy that communicates
itself to the reader immediately, and the long sentences avoid
confusion or tedium by containing vivid and clearly realised
images. It is a good, descriptive journalistic style that
would have pleased his editors because it is highly readable.
Admittedly he is also wholly concerned with surfaces, and so
there is little evidence of a capacity, in point of view or in
terminology, to get beneath what is visible and analyse.
Johnston
was not an intellectual; his writing at this stage reflected
the way in which his job demanded that he report the world,
and that was to convey the experience without going far into
the meaning. Not only is this good reporting, but it is also a
sound training for a novelist.
Later in his life he was able in his writing to draw meaning from
his experiences, including some he had in Kunming. He once
walked along the main canal of the Pan Lung river where he
came upon some Australian eucalypts, which contained, wedged
in their lower forks, the bodies of dead babies 'clad in fine
clothes and with their tiny, cold feet hanging from the
scented foliage, neat in shiny slippers of bright new satin.
They were there to placate the evil spirits and to prevent the
next child from dying.'39 He was to recall this experience in
the last months of his life, while writing the novel A
Cartload of Clay. There he places it in the context of David
Meredith's struggle to find meaning in his life by
establishing connections that will transcend differences of
time and place. The result is a peculiar suggestion of
personal destiny in the events of Meredith's past:
So Meredith kept his eyes lowered and sought for links, and now he
could pin down one important point in the arabesque, because
little Emma, the maternal grandmother who had looked after him
while their parents were away in the First World War, had been
an orphaned girl in Bendigo during the gold rush, and for a
time had lived with the Chinese miners in the diggings at
Eaglehawk . . . And when these Chinese had grown older and had
prospered or failed or been driven out by the hardening and
stupid racism of the awkwardly growing country, they had gone
back to their homeland, to Canton and Foochow and some of them
farther out west to the Yunnan plateau, and they had taken
with them as gifts little exotic trees in pots to demonstrate
to the stay-at-homes the bizarre distance of their journeyings,
and these were the stately trees, massively flourishing in an
unfamiliar soil, that overhung the Pan Lung river, where once
upon a time he had walked and talked with Wen Yi-tuo. It was
not altogether unreasonable to imagine that they might have
been the very trees planted by one of the Chinese diggers who
had befriended his grandmother in Bendigo. (There had been
one evening, a tranquil dusk of velvet violet, smelling of
damp moss and dust laid by rain, when the poet had pointed out
to him the dark bundles jammed into the forks of the trees,
the bodies of the dead babies...) (CofC 39—40)
Johnston met the Chinese poet Wen Yi-tuo around this time, in
Kunming. They were probably introduced by the subject of
another of his experiences in that city, a woman whose name is
unknown but who appears in A Cartload of Clay as 'Phoebe'. She
seems to have been an American who had gone to China as a
Methodist missionary before the war, but when Johnston met her
she had taken a job buying pig's bristles and shipping them
back to the States for paint brushes. In an album covering his
time in China there is a photograph that is likely to be of
her, for her appearance loosely fits the description of Phoebe
in A Cartload of Clay as 'small and shy, with freckles and
auburn hair and a childish snub nose, and of a rather
scholarly bent' (CofC 41). In the novel Meredith talks in a
callous way of his affair with Phoebe. She was, he says, 'an
ardent and accomplished mistress, which rather surprised him,
knowing her earlier prim background and her Methodist
upbringing' (CofC 41). He goes on to say that he rented a tiny
doll's house of a cottage in the grounds of a hospital and
kept it for months as a 'place of assignation'. The affair
ended, he says, because of a combination of her possessiveness
and his guilt at not telling her about his wife in Australia.
Elsie recalls Johnston telling her about a woman in China he
was involved with, but doesn't remember any of the details.
One thing that Johnston could not resist about the woman was
her occupation, and he used it several times in his fiction.
 |
 |
| The
mysterious 'Jane' or 'Phoebe' in Burma |
Flower
vendor in Kunming, Western China |
By mid-1945 the war in China was no longer headline news in
Australia, and Johnston's reports were now usually found on
the back page of the Argus, whereas the year before they had
been consistently in a position of prominence. Headline space
was now increasingly given to pieces by Geoffrey Hutton and
David McNicoll on the European conflict and its aftermath, or
to Axel Olsen and James O'Connor on the continuing struggle
against the Japanese in the Philippines. In fact the war in
China was rapidly cooling down. This gave Johnston an excuse
to take a break. In what sounds like a plot for a comic movie,
a group of US Cavalry people were taking a plane-load of
Australian slouch hats into the high country of Tibet in order
to trade them for hardy Tibetan mountain ponies. The Tibetan
nomads were apparently very partial to digger hats. The
colonel in charge of the operation invited Johnston and
Liberty magazine photographer James Burke, who spoke fluent
Chinese, along for the ride, though it turned out to be
somewhat more testing than they expected.
The party flew from Kunming to an airstrip near the town of Yung
Kwan Chai, which was some 3600 metres (12,000 feet) above sea
level, 'the highest airfield in the world', wrote Johnston.40
As he stepped from the plane he was breathless, and not just
from the lack of oxygen:
Here was a valley of breathtaking colour and beauty ... a valley of
a million flowers glittering in bright warm sunshine ... And
dominating the far end of the valley, in peerless, shimmering
majesty, stood the white, 25,000 ft. peak of Minya Konka,
appearing to cover half the sky . .. 41
He pressed some of those
glittering flowers into a letter back to Elsie. It was the
beauty of this valley, and others like it, that inspired the
setting for the novel High Valley (1948); Johnston never tired
of enthusing lyrically about the valleys of Tibet.
Together with Burke, Johnston went with a pack train into the
higher peaks around Minya Konka, where blizzards, freezing
temperatures and precipitous ledges made progress extremely
hazardous. They camped with Tibetan nomads, sleeping in their
yurts (tents), eating tsamba (a heavy barleymeal bread) and
drinking Tibetan tea with lumps of yak butter floating in it.
One nomad, an extraordinary cowboy (or yakboy) called T'se
Ch'i, accommodated them, along with his family, for three days
and nights. T'se Ch'i had introduced himself in an auspicious
way when Johnston was instructing some lama priests in the use
of a rifle:
I looked up and saw a tall, slim man watching us, a picturesquely
handsome man with the face and bearing and dignity of a red
Indian chieftain. I handed him the rifle. He took a quick aim
— there was almost no difference in his movement to accept
the weapon and his actual firing — and he plugged the
tobacco tin clean in the centre.42
 |
 |
| (L-R)
George
Johnston & James Burke in Tibet |
(L-R)
George
Johnston & James Burke in Burma |
Here, enjoying a strange
hospitality, Johnston had his thirty-third birthday. He was
one of the very few Australians, perhaps even the first, to
have visited the high regions of Tibet up to that time. He
reflected with a hint of nostalgia on how, beneath the
unfamiliar exterior, life in the Tibetan community was not
unlike life on an Australian farm. 'There were the children',
he wrote,
playing at evening, throwing stones at the sheep.
There was the constant stream of neighbours and visitors
dropping in for afternoon tea, or to borrow a cylinder of yak
cheese, or to compare jewellery and babies — I doubt if any
people in all the world are more affectionate towards children
than the Tibetans — or just to gossip as women do at
afternoon tea gatherings the world over ... There was T'se
Ch'i striding along with us in the afternoons when we went to
shoot rabbits and pheasants ... There was an old man and his
two sons returning with his yak train to the little nomads'
camp, and being welcomed by shouting children and barking,
tailwagging dogs, and the old man lifting the smallest boy to
the back of his horse for the ride into the horse lines. There
was so much of warm living and kindness and humanity . . .43
It was during this time that Johnston had an unforgettable
meeting with the leader of the white sect of lamas known to
his followers as the Living Buddha. It was known that the
great man's proudest possession was an old phonograph, so
Johnston and Burke had gone prepared with a gift recording. It
happened that the only one they could lay hands on was of a
popular song called 'It Must Be Jelly 'Cause Jam Don't Shake
Like That', so it was with some anxiety that they awaited the
Living Buddha's reaction. They need not have feared: 'The tune
was received with tremendous approval, the Living Buddha
nodding his head rhythmically to the beat of the hot jazz, his
eyes closed, and a beatific expression on his face. Then he
played for us his two records. One was Mei Lan Fan singing a
Chinese operatic piece. The other was Noel Coward's
'Don't put
your daughter
on the
stage, Mrs Worthington'!44
After the entertainment, Johnston and the Living Buddha settled
down to a serious debate on reincarnation and the comparative
merits of Christian and Buddhist beliefs. 'Christianity has
a childish logic that appeals to large groups of simple
people', asserted the sage, 'but to an intelligent man it is
unsatisfactory. Logic in religion should not be easy to find.
Ours is a religion for the individual scholar or thinker,
yours is a good enough religion for the masses.'45 There could
hardly have been an Australian precedent for such a lofty
conference, nor hardly an Australian less qualified to
participate.
Johnston had no religious faith at all, and no professed
respect for Christianity. On the other hand, he had acquired
some appreciation of Eastern philosophical views. He did not,
however, record his own responses to the Living Buddha's
opinions.
Johnston's time in Tibet did nothing for his respect for the
general lama population. With Burke he spent some time in a
lamasery called Konka Gomba, reputedly the setting of
Shangri-La, the retreat in James Hilton's novel Lost
Horizons.
Johnston found the reality to be far from the ideal refuge of
the fiction, for within the lamasery walls the lamas showed
all the jealousy and avarice that characterised the war-torn
world outside. They were not even particularly devout, being
more preoccupied with the dollar exchange rate than with
prayer. Johnston and Burke were relieved to get away from the
place.
The final days of the Tibetan interlude came close to being tragic.
As they descended from the higher regions, Burke developed a
severe kidney infection. The pain was such that he grew
delirious, and one night attempted his own life with the colt
.45 they were carrying. Johnston injected him with morphine
and nursed him back to a state fit for travel, although, with
Burke continually falling off his horse, progress was slow
and painful. They arrived back at base camp later than had
been arranged, only to find everything cleared away and the
DC3 that was to fly them home standing at the end of the
runway revving for take-off. As it made its run, Johnston's
heart sank: they would never get out of such a remote place,
he thought, and would die before anyone found them.
Miraculously, at that moment the aeroplane's starboard engine
cut out, and the pilot was unable to complete the take-off.
Johnston fired his revolver, and they were rescued. Burke
recovered and stayed on in Asia for many years after the war,
and he and Johnston managed to maintain their friendship,
although their lives went in widely different directions.
There is a brief but affectionate sketch of him under his own
name in A Cartload of Clay, where the rescue incident is
described, and is concluded by a reference to Burke's fatal
fall in the Himalayas in the early 1960s.
It was the right ending for Jim. And a damn sight better than dying
in the squalor and cold and rat-stench and misery and pain of
that terrible chorten eighteen years earlier. (CofC 100)
Although the visit to Tibet lasted only about five weeks, it was an
important time in Johnston's imaginative life. He was to write
six novels and one factually based book out of his Asian
experiences, and two of these, High Valley and Journey through
Tomorrow, make substantial use of his knowledge of Tibet.
Tibet had not only provided a break from the war, it had also
put him through something of a mind-expanding experience of a
kind he could never have had by staying back at base. Indeed,
Asia generally was an important educational and imaginative
stimulant, and he was to write about it often in the next
decade. Specifically, his prolonged contact with Asian
cultures planted a seed of respect for an attitude to life
that is not obsessed with a successful career, though it would
be years yet before that seed would germinate.
In August Johnston was back in Kunming in his role of war
correspondent. One of his first reports after Tibet was on the
pitiable return of those masses of exiles from Kweilin almost
exactly a year earlier. They were struggling along that same
road, in the opposite direction now, but just as
overwhelmingly
lamentable as before, with just as many collapsing to die
along the way beside the littered remains of last year's
victims. Certain images, especially ones that expressed the
will to survive, stuck in Johnston's mind for a lifetime: 'an
old woman in faded coolie blue with a treadle sewing machine
strapped to her back, and a wispily-bearded man with one
trachoma-whitened eye who was bent double by the great weight
of the sow he was carrying' (CSFN 22).
There were also moments of levity. In Kunming, Johnston and Sydney
journalist Nigel Palethorpe along with the townspeople
celebrated (slightly prematurely) the end of the war by
setting off fireworks. When they went back to the store for
more fireworks, they found, Johnston wrote, that 'with shrewd
oriental realization of the principles of supply and demand
the price had already trebled'.46
Late in August the wind-up of the war quickened. Johnston joined
James O'Connor in Manila to cover talks between General
MacArthur and Japanese envoys about the terms of surrender.
Then in September this pair followed MacArthur to Japan for
the last stages. On the way Johnston was able briefly to go to
the now recaptured Shanghai to report the Chinese acceptance
of surrender from Field Marshal Oka-mura. It was his last look
at China, where he had seen so many new and extraordinary
things.
In the weeks leading up to the surrender ceremony, Johnston and
O'Connor sent back reports on the turmoil of life in Japan
immediately after the dropping of the atomic bomb. Johnston's
pieces concentrated, again, on matters of human rather than
military interest, which were left to O'Connor. He was
appalled by what he saw of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. He stood on
the rubble (alarmingly ignorant of the radiation effects) and
reflected 'dazed, uncomprehending . . . fearful' on the
implications of what had occurred, and concluded that
The
pent-up forces of India, heaving and tumultuous; the
unpredictable power and violence of China, where civil war
blazed again even as I stood in a shabby mission garden near
Hiroshima; the strange mysticism of Tibet, which had not known
this war; the soft, misleading apathy of a ravaged Burma —
all these things were no longer as important as the dead birds
and the blasted flowers.47
The saturation bombing, too, had
left its mark on the people of Yokohama, Kawasaki and Tokyo:
... children hiding their eyes or fleeing in panic, girls turning
their backs and cringing as if expecting blows, men just
looking at us without expression. Sometimes a little boy would
poke out his tongue and then flee wildly across the fields. In
most of the faces there was a dull apathy, in some dismay, in
some bewilderment, in many a sullen hostility. One had the
sensation of walking precariously along the crumbling lip of
a smouldering volcano, but nothing happened.48
As well as the victims, there were those who had benefited from the
war. Johnston interviewed a group of nine Japanese
millionaires at their plush hotel — bankers and
industrialists who had made massive profits. It was a sour and
uncomfortable interview, as the businessmen, immaculately
dressed and, according to Johnston, eating lobster from silver
plates, deplored the effects of the war on the Japanese
working man. He sent the Argus a suitably sarcastic piece on
this, and another on the luxury in which Axis diplomats were
living in Tokyo at this time. Another piece conveyed the
atmosphere of fear and suspicion as MacArthur's men began the
search for war criminals:
We walked back to the sumptuous dining hall, panelled in teakwood,
and two Germans came hurriedly towards us, the leading man
breathlessly announcing that he was not a Nazi but the man
following him was, and the second man stared at him
malevolently and snarled 'Pig!'
There was a constant whispering in the gardens of bamboo and
decorative pines, and in the dim corridors of the
cream-coloured building there were the shadowy figures of fear
and intrigue and treachery and distrust. It was a scented
place, but we were glad to get away from it.49
Then there was the group of right-wing dandies — a mixture of
Russian, French, German and Swedish men and women, mostly
young — who had been living in the hills of Karuizawa as
parasites on the country they had expected would win the war,
but who now turned collaborators. Now that the Americans were
in control, they expressed hatred for the Germans and
Japanese, and complained bitterly that they had refused to
share their luxuries with them. 'Will we have to become Soviet
citizens now?' one of them weakly asked Johnston, who wrote:
'They had filled their glasses with the last of the vodka and
they were toasting a picture on the wall — a framed yellowed
photograph of the last Tsar of all the Russians ... '50
The last phase of his war correspondence duties took place on 3
September, when he attended the surrender ceremony between
Japan and the Allied forces on board the USS Missouri.
Johnston and O'Connor sent the Argus a joint report, which
occupied the whole of the front page, giving full details of
the signing of the treaty and conveying the atmosphere of a
moving and spectacular occasion. After this there was only the
business of tidying up and preparing to go home. He did not do
this immediately, however, but stayed on for a few weeks
putting together his material for the book on Asia that was to
become Journey through Tomorrow.
How
is his contribution to war journalism to be valued? He
undoubtedly played his part in keeping the Australian public
informed and quite possibly in sustaining its morale. This was
what every conscientious war correspondent hoped for, and it
is difficult to find anything wrong in that. Many of
Australia's best journalists, Geoffrey Hutton, David McNicoll,
John Hetherington, Osmar White, Wilfred Burchett, to name but
a few, earned distinction in the role, and Johnston firmly
established himself among their ranks. Furthermore, he did
this without alienating himself from their comradeship. On the
contrary, he was generally well liked, despite a certain
wariness at times of his magpie approach to gathering information.
It is true that in New Guinea some correspondents had
reservations about him; but others, such as Osmar White and
Geoffrey Hutton, defended him warmly. Geoffrey Hutton wrote
that he had the gift of 'dissolving personal and social
barriers, giving cheek to politicians, editors and generals.
Nobody ever resented it. He could charm the birds out of the
trees.'51 Bruce Kneale tells a story that
illustrates this. When Johnston came back from Asia, Errol
Knox said to him one day in the office: 'You'll have to come
back and start work again on the paper soon.' Knox was a
figure whose dignity nobody on the paper except Johnston dared
to lower. 'Christ, Knokka, I can't come back yet,' he
retorted. 'I've still got six hundred quid of yours in
expenses to spend!'52 Greeba Jamison insists that
Johnston had a kind and sensitive side that was endearing: 'To
some of the younger journalists who were taking their work
frightfully seriously, he was always helpful, encouraging; he
was never the "distinguished war correspondent" when
he came back on leave — just one of the gang in the
reporter's room.'53 With testimonies such as these
from his colleagues he had every reason to feel pleased with
the way he had conducted himself as a journalist and war
correspondent.
Yet
Johnston was to look back on this time of his life, and the
work, with scorn. At least, this is so if we take his
autobiographical fiction as representing his actual views on
the matter. It is difficult not to feel that the following
passage from My
Brother Jack is
self-reproach of the harshest kind, and that this is one of
the moments in the novel when David Meredith is closest to his
creator:
...
the falsity I built, or allowed to be built, around myself is
perhaps less excusable. I wrote copiously and I wrote
brilliantly and I wrote with all the practised 'flairs' for
which Gavin Turley had commended me, and I skulked and dodged
and I was desperately afraid, and 1 wrote myself into my own
lie, the lie I had
to
create, so that it was taken for granted that I was there, right
there, in
the thin red line of heroes, and gradually I picked up all the
tricks of evasion and avoidance and wove them into an almost
fool-proof pattern. I suffered nothing more than a spurious,
self-inflicted heroism. (MBJ
330)
One
wonders if anyone ever did accuse Johnston of this kind of
deception, because there is nothing in his war correspondence
or his war books that deliberately attempts to give the
impression that the writer is 'right there' in the front line
of the action. As has already been pointed out, most of
Johnston's war articles concentrate on human interest subjects
away from the actual conflict. Why then did he suppose that
people did infer this, making him a liar by default?
The
reasons seem to have been both professional and personal. He
had always felt that the very situation of the war
correspondent was parasitical, and that the only authentic
roles in war were the soldier's and the victim's. One recalls
with what conviction he wrote about Australian heroism and
'blood sacrifice' in the war books (and later in My
Brother Jack). He
was to devote a whole novel, The
Far Road, to
exposing the essential self-interest, not only of the role of
the war correspondent, but of journalists in general. David
Meredith says in the latter novel that 'Duplicity was
inextricably woven into the modus
operandi of
the game',54 and that 'In a later age, Judas would
have been a journalist'.55
As
well as this disillusionment with the profession, Johnston
came to hate himself for having chosen it. He must have
thought of that failure to join his mates at the enlistment
centre, of Rod Maclean, of his brother and indeed of his
father in World War I, and believed that he had taken the less
honourable course. One perceives that his question to Bruce
Kneale 'You think I'm a coward, don't you?' suggests that it
was really Johnston who thought of himself
as
a coward, and that his choice to serve out the war in the
capacity of a war correspondent was an act of shameful
self-interest and evasion. When he came to write about that
sense of personal and professional dereliction in The
Far Road and
the Meredith trilogy, it formed part of his tortuous purpose
to expose that particular George Johnston he once had been,
and to annihilate him.
ENDNOTES
1.
This succession of Argus
editors was compiled from Who's
Who in Australia.
2.
Bruce Kneale,
interview with GK, 1985.
3.
W. G. Cousins to GJ,
26 Nov. 1941 (Mitchell Library).
4.
Australia at War 5,
275.
5.
Ibid. 227-8.
6.
Ibid. 4.
7.
See George Johnston,
'Gallipoli Paintings' in Art
and Australia, Sept. 1967,
pp. 466-9. Nolan confirmed this in
an interview with GK,
1982.
8.
Osmar White, interview
with GK, 1983.
9.
Personnel records of
the Argus and
Australasian Limited.
10.
The notebook was begun
on Friday, 13 February, but he backdated entries to 3 January,
based on 'enquiries,
examinations of reports
etc., of earlier activity'. The notebook, a simple exercise
book, was discovered in an
American rare book
catalogue and purchased in 1981 by the National Library,
Canberra, who published it in
1985 as War
Diary 1942.
11.
This account of the
state of Port Moresby when they arrived was given by Osmar
White, interview with GK, 1983.
12.
Sidney Nolan recalls
Johnston telling him these things in Greece in the 1950s:
interview with GK, 1982.
13.
Bruce Kneale,
interview with GK, 1985.
14.
Osmar White, interview
with GK, 1983.
15.
Osmar White, interview
with GK, 1983.
16.
Elsie Johnston,
interview with GK, 1984.
17.
Geoffrey Hutton,
interview with GK, 1981.
18.
Life,, 5 July
1943, pp. 104-12.
19.
Geoffrey Hutton,
interview with GK, 1981.
20.
Geoffrey Hutton,
interview with GK, 1981.
21.
Elsie Johnston,
interview with GK, 1984.
22.
Greeba Jamison to GK,
13 Feb. 1983.
23.
Geoffrey Hutton, 'He
Died Alive', Age, 23
July 1970.
24.
Bruce Kneale,
interview with GK, 1985.
25.
Skyscrapers in the
Mist 99.
26.
GJ to W. G. Cousins,
28 Jan. 1944 (Mitchell Library).
27.
Journey through
Tomorrow 379.
28.
Ibid. 84.
29.
Ibid. 100-1.
30.
Argus, 25
Aug. 1944, p. 2.
31.
'Battle Looms in
Kwangsi Province', Argus, 23
Sept. 1944, p. 2.
32.
'Communism Spreads in
Southern Europe', Argus, 4
Dec. 1944, p. 2.
33.
K. E. I. Wallace-Crabbe,
'Pens and Yarns, Wings and Wheels' (unpublished MS).
34.
Elsie Johnston to W.
G. Cousins, 28 March 1945 (Mitchell Library).
35.
Bruce Kneale,
interview with GK, 1985.
36.
Bruce Kneale,
interview with GK, 1985.
37.
Journey through
Tomorrow 97—8.
38.
Ibid. 117-18.
39.
Ibid. 120.
40.
Ibid. 218.
41.
Ibid. 223-4.
42.
Ibid. 284.
43.
Ibid. 288.
44.
Ibid. 291-2.
45.
Ibid. 296.
46.
'End of the War Brings
Big Problems', Argus, 20
Aug. 1945.
47.
Journey through
Tomorrow 399.
48.
Ibid. 389.
49.
Ibid. 396.
50.
Ibid. 397.
51.
Geoffrey Hutton, 'He
died Alive'.
52.
Bruce Kneale,
interview with GK, 1985.
53.
Greeba Jamison to GK,
13 Feb. 1983.
54.
The Far Road 47.
55.
Ibid. 75.
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