Cirrus@Austlit

George Johnston was born in Melbourne and educated at state schools before becoming an apprentice lithographer. Several articles on sailing ships secured him a job as a journalist for the Argus, but it was his syndicated dispatches during World War II that attracted attention. During the 1940s he published several books and diaries on his experience of war in New Guinea, China, Burma and Italy. After the war he joined the Sydney Sun and was sent to London in 1951 as a European correspondent. Accompanying him was his second wife, Charmian Clift, who shared Johnston's passion for writing. In 1954 Johnston abandoned his career in journalism and moved to the Greek islands where he and Clift made a precarious living from their writing. But after he contracted tuberculosis, they returned to Sydney in 1964. That year, Johnston's semi-autobiographical novel, My Brother Jack, won the Miles Franklin Award.

Johnston's poor health produced a sense of mortality that drove him to concentrate on serious fiction, avoiding the pot-boilers that had provided his income in Greece. In 1965 Charmian Clift wrote the script for a televised version of My Brother Jack while Johnston worked on a sequel to his famous book. The novel became a trilogy after the publication of Clean Straw for Nothing, which also won the Miles Franklin Award in 1969, and the unfinished A Cartload of Clay (1971). The trilogy, drawing many elements from Johnston's life, dramatises the experience of David Meredith whose quest for meaning continues in each novel, but leaves him with the realisation that definitive meaning cannot be obtained and the search itself must be better appreciated.

In May 1970 Johnson was awarded the OBE for his services to literature. He died two months later. Johnston's work continues to be taught in schools and the continuing appeal of My Brother Jack was demonstrated in 2001 by a new television adaptation .