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About 200 Australian journalists have written novels in the past two centuries. None has achieved wider popular acclaim than the dual Miles Franklin Award winner, George Johnston. In 1995 his novel My Brother Jack (1964) was named one of the 20th century's twelve most influential Australian books. In 1984, it was voted, by a wide margin, the best novel published in Australia since 1945. Yet Johnston's critical recognition has been comparatively sparse and there has been no detailed examination of how his journalism influenced his fiction. This article argues that Johnston's training and experience in journalism informed and enabled his fiction, thereby helping to shape Australia's national identity. Privileged by journalism's much misunderstood magic, his search for meaning in that identity helped to shape his own identity. In addressing that misunderstanding, this paper calls for a new interdisciplinary partnership between scholars in literature and journalism so that the journalistic inheritance in so many novels can be more comprehensively examined. (Author's abstract)
