Brisbane is so sleepy, so slatternly, so sprawlingly unlovely… It is simply the most ordinary place in the world…It was so shabby and makeshift … a place where poetry could never occur.

My Take: I have a very warm spot in my heart for David Malouf. He’s the kind of writer that I would love to be – a poet who divides his time between writing classical allegories set in the Roman Empire and stories of humid days and stormy nights spent on the decks of Queenslander houses. He’s living proof that “Queensland literary giant” is no oxymoron and as such I cling to him dearly.

“Johnno” isn’t Malouf’s best work (I’ll plump for the Miles Franklin winning The Great World in this respect), but as a fellow Queenslander, it is my favourite. No other book I’ve read quite evokes the experiences and outlook of the Great Northern State quite like Malouf’s first book, “Johnno”. While the Brisbane City Council may not usually be recognised as a noted judge of literary achievement, its recent selection of “Johnno” as the book that best represents Brisbane was spot on.

While quite short and simply written, “Johnno” is a complex and layered book. In a funny way, “Johnno” is part Hugh Lunn, part Aeschylus. At the most basic level, it is a lovingly told coming of age story of two unlikely friends in 1940s and 50s Brisbane. Thematically however, Malouf piles many layers of meaning into this work. I’m no literary expert, but to my mind the most interesting part of this book is how Malouf uses the evolving relationship between the urbane but insecure auto-biographical protagonist, ‘Dante’ and his hedonistic and superficially assured best friend Johnno as a platform for exploring Malouf’s evolving perceptions of place and family.

On the one hand, throughout his youth Dante/Malouf envies Johnno’s bravura and seemingly blissfully relaxed approach to life. While he feels like an outsider, Dante/Malouf genuinely wants to fit into the simple, happy, physical lifestyle in Brisbane that his father long enjoyed. On the other hand, Dante/Malouf is repelled by Johnno’s lack of refinement and ambition. Dante/Malouf sees himself as ultimately being apart from Brisbane, an intellectual and sophisticate with broader horizons and ambitions than other Queenslanders.

Unfortunately, as a young man, Dante/Malouf invariably failed to see that his perceptions of Johnno/his father/Brisbane were more a function of his insecurity than their shallowness. Throughout the majority of the novel Dante/Malouf views Johnno/his father/Brisbane in black and white. As a result he feels the need to reject what he feels Johnno/his father/Brisbane stand for in order to validate his own, broader intellectual ambitions.

In this regard, Dante/Malouf’s strident complaints about Brisbane ring true to anyone who grew up there:

‘I might grow old in Brisbane, but I would never grow up.’

‘Brisbane is so sleepy, so slatternly, so sprawlingly unlovely… It is simply the most ordinary place in the world…It was so shabby and makeshift … a place where poetry could never occur.’

However, the fact that these complaints are so familiar directly undermine any justification for Dante/Malouf’s sense of separateness.  Dante/Malouf was never as isolated and stifled in Brisbane as he thought as a young man. Many of those around him who he had written off as dully shallow and suburban had similar rich internal lives and ambitions. However, it is only when looking back with the benefit of age and the perspective of having lived in Paris, Italy and London that Malouf is able to realise that Johnno/his father/Brisbane were far more nuanced and complex than he had given them credit for.

Malouf has a real talent for bringing out these realisations in the most affecting ways. In one of the saddest moments of the book, Johnno’s last letter to Dante before his suicide reveals that he had always admired the intellectual qualities in Dante that he had thought Johnno had misunderstood, describing him as:

‘the most exotic creature — so strange and untouchable. Like a foreign prince’.

Similarly, when sorting through his father’s belongings soon after his death, Dante is forced to similarly revaluate his perceptions of his Father:

‘Now as I began to sort through his “effects” it occurred to me how little I had really known him … I had forced upon my father the character that fitted most easily with my image of myself; to have had to admit to any complexity in him would have compromised my own.’

In this way, I think “Johnno” is a story about what all Queenslanders go through at some point in their lives – the process of revaluating the black and white judgements of their youth about the place in which they grew up. “Johnno” is about the process of leaning that while Queensland is far from the most cosmopolitan place in the world, neither is it a cultural backwater devoid of the human experience. Life might still seem impossibly boring there, but it’s ultimately the people that make a place what it is. If you make the effort to look below the surface, you’ll see that the people of Queensland are just as complex and nuanced participants in the human experience as anyone else. It might not make you feel as special or unique to admit it, but it opens up a world of enriching relationships that might never have realised existed.

Highlights:

‘Still the fact remains, he had me hooked. As he had, of course, from the beginning. I had been writing my book about Johnno from the moment we met.’

….

‘The hundred possibilities a situation contains may be more significant than the occurrence of any of them, and metaphor truer in the long run than fact.’

Synopsis:

My Take: Much like Joh himself, there’s nothing fancy to this book, just a collection of The Flying Peanut’s more memorable quotes. It did give me some pleasure transcribing these quotes into the blogosphere. While Google is doing a good job of making everything ever written searchable through Google Books, there’s a bit of an online void at the moment once you go looking for the esoterica of Australian politics beyond about a decade ago. So far as I can see, this is the only place online that many of these quotes currently appear – so enjoy. Especially the non-Queenslanders – you don’t know what you missed:

On Aboriginals:

• “Land rights is a communist plot to set up land bases that could be used for subversive activities by other countries as well as for guerrilla training centres for other countries.”
• “Aborigines are as wealthy as Arab oil sheiks…. They wouldn’t be here today if it wasn’t for the United States of America, together with our people, who fought the Coral Sea battle.”

On Morals:

• “Queensland will not be dragged into the condom culture”
• “There is no animal, no beast on this earth that resorts to the sort of tactics that these characters [homosexuals] do. And I think that it is disgusting that they offer to give their blood and cause the death of so many people.”
• “The day care concept, boiled down, means leaving you child with someone else to bring up while you do what you like – go to work, learn pottery etc.”
• “No Goannas, No Gays”

On Queensland:

• “We are a federation and I support a federation but we would operate much more effectively and efficiently and really surge ahead if we were on our own.”
• “We will work with [Bob Hawke] provided he is working in Queensland’s interests. If he attempts to interfere in any shape or form, then it’s on his head. And if he’s so unsure of himself and so far committed to the communists around his shoulders and breathing down his neck, then God help Australia.”
• “What is good for Queensland is good for Australia.”
• “I don’t mind being called the Flying Peanut. I think this is unique: in each of the three Government aircraft, we’ve gone more than the distance from here to the moon.”
• “I really worry about Queensland. I lose a lot of sleep because I don’t know what will happen when I go.”

On Policy:

• “The Great Barrier Reef is really big. The people who say it’s being ruined don’t know how big it is.”
• “We won’t be able to sit on uranium. Firstly because it would not be right and secondly because it would be wrong.”
• “I oppose tobacco tax on principle. It is a new tax and Queensland does not have new taxes.”
• “If I had been building the dam and they had ordered me to stop the dam, do you think I would have stopped it, just because some guy in Canberra or somewhere else said it was unconstitutional?”

On other cultures:

• “Just because a few migrants want their spicy tucker, I fail to see what the Australian community as a whole should suffer the possibility of foot-and-mouth disease.”

Dealing with the Press:

• “I’d love to tell you but I can’t. Just look at me. Don’t you worry about that until tomorrow, goodness me.”
• “I’m not talking to you on what you want to talk… Well I’m not interested in anything you say. You’re always so wide of the mark and generally so critical so I won’t even bother answering what you’ve got to say. Anybody else?”
• “Don’t you worry about it, we are looking after it”
• On being asked a question on condoms by a reporter: “Let’s come clean, Elizabeth. I thought you looked a decent sort of girl. You don’t mean to tell me that you are in that category also? What’s your lifestyle Elizabeth? What do you really think? Do you really think this is the way for the nation to go? We are being asked to say ‘you go ahead and play around, the Government will help you’?!
• “I’m not interested in that, or in anything anyone else says”
• “The greatest thin that could happen to the State and the nation is when we can get rid of the media. Then we can live in peace and tranquillity and no one would know anything.”
• “You don’t tell the frogs anything before you drain the swamp.”