These three lectures trace themes of war, soldiership, masculinity, femininity, and family relationships as they unfold sequentially through My Brother Jack.

LECTURE ONE: BOYHOOD

My Brother Jack was first published to critical acclaim in 1964. It follows the lives of David Meredith and his brother Jack from David’s childhood in 1914 (when he was three) to 20th March 1945, when British forces recaptured Mandalay, Central Burma, from the Japanese army. The lives of the two leading characters are deeply affected by the two world wars and by the world-wide Depression of the early 1930s. Johnston also explores ways in which these events affected Australia more generally. More particularly, his novel documents changes in family and suburban life over the thirty-year period. My Brother Jack considers complex issues of male self-definition, of ethics and family relationships.

The following are among the questions raised:

• War is a disaster, but does it possess the positive aspect of providing essential self-definition and a cause for men like Jack?
• Is Jack presented unequivocally as an ideal Australian man?
• What are the qualities of the ideal Australian man?
• If Jack embodies this ideal, where does that leave David?
• How justified is David’s sense of himself as weak and selfish and of Jack as strong, outgoing and affectionate?
• Does the fact that he has a sensitive conscience exonerate David?
• How justified is David’s guilt about his own social and material success in relation to Jack’s failure in these spheres?
• How do you define a man’s failure or success?
• What gender issues are raised by this novel?
• How does the ideal of a man as a brave fighter fare in My Brother Jack?
• “In My Brother Jack individual morality is the primary interest, overriding themes of heroism, war, definitions of manhood, and representations of the Australian national character.” How far do you agree?

The Young David Meredith

The character of David Meredith is a key for interpreting My Brother Jack. We’ll begin our exploration therefore by mustering and exploring clues about David’s character. Since Jack is the main reference point for David’s characterisation, we’ll also be discussing him.

Two further questions concern David as narrator:

• How reliable is he, especially as a judge of merit and character?
• Is the reader able to read between the lines of what David reveals and arrive at judgments of himself and Jack that differ from David’s own?

Childhood

David’s childhood seems to have been neglected and lonely. When his father returns from overseas service in World War I, he describes himself as being charged with “a huge numbing terror”, and as “sobbing with fear” (p. 4). He reacts to the welcome home party by vomiting (p. 5). This symbolises his response to the War as it has affected his family. He lives in a house crammed with maimed men, and the thought of dying or being wounded in war fills him with terror. He reacts similarly to hospital visits to the war wounded—with “desperate Sunday feelings…an extension of the terror that I knew to be real” (p. 9). The War’s permanent effects on him are summed up early:

Yet what is significant is to realize how every corner of that little suburban house must have been impregnated for years with the very essence of some gigantic and sombre existence that had taken place thousands of miles away, and quite outside the state of my being, yet which ultimately had come to invade my mind and stay there, growing all the time, forming into a shape. (p. 11)

Already in his early childhood David is judging himself as inferior to Jack: “it is perfectly true that the period which had turned him into a wild one had made me something of a namby-pamby” (10). The incident with the Dollicus creeper seeds (pp. 10-11) is significant because it reveals that one person in the family loved David—his grandmother Emma—but he seems to have been starved for affection from others. Together with the family’s favourite Christian name, Jack as the elder son inherited the family’s approval.

Suburban Life: First Round

Another trait of David’s that emerges from the early chapters of My Brother Jack is dislike and contempt for the “undistinguished,” “mundane” suburban house in which he grew up. He plays on the irony of the house’s name, Avalon, the mythical fairy kingdom featured in romances of King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table. He pours scorn also on attempts by nearby owners to dress up their small houses with fancy names (p. 29). Are there good reasons for David’s hatred of suburbia, do you think, or is he just a snob? The following passage, opening Chapter 3, is relevant:

This world, without boundaries or specific definition or safety, spread forever, flat and diffuse, monotonous yet inimical, pieced together in a dull geometry of dull houses behind silver-painted fences of wire or splintery palings or picket fences and hedges of privet and cypress and lantana… (p. 29)

What are features of suburbia, then, that David objects to? How far does the widespread disillusionment about World War I, and the great police strike of the 1920s, contribute to his attitude? He objects especially to the mediocrity of the suburbs, the fact that “they lacked the grim adventure of true poverty” experienced in the downright slums of Fitzroy and Collingwood (p. 35).

Early Contrasts with Jack

As a teenager, Jack responds to his situation by fighting, and this is the advice that he gives to David: “Listen, nipper, you got to have a go at it. Even if you know you can’t bloody win you still got to have a go” (p. 31). Jack takes on the leader of the gang who broke his sweetheart’s shop window. By contrast David responds to the life around him by curling up in the seaman’s chest in the Front Room. Jack develops a passion for cricket and football, and as a mere youth takes on the six-foot Snowy Bretherton in a boxing match, finally winning against him. Meanwhile David, with no aptitude for sport, beats up the weakly, epileptic Harry Meade, to Jack’s disgust. Jack’s final childhood triumph is when he warns his father not to repeat the Saturday night bathroom punishments (p. 47). David’s punishments continue, however, until his father is held back by the combined efforts of the doctor and David’s mother. Jack’s chivalry, towards his girlfriend, his mother and Harry, is felt by David to be an admirable trait that he himself lacks. We might ask however whether Jack’s chivalry might have extended to the protection of his younger brother?

More significantly, we are also entitled to ask: Is David a failure in his own eyes and in the eyes of others, because by nature he lacks the qualities that define young Australian manhood, as embodied in Jack? These qualities are as follows.

• Jack is a larrikin and a rebel;
• a non-nerd—David is more academic;
• a good fighter;
• a good protector of the weak;
• a good sportsman and interested in sport;
• possesses a sense of fair play.

But how justified is David in blaming himself for lacking these qualities? Might another culture or time have encouraged him to value the qualities that are naturally his, such as sensitivity and imagination? Might a different culture have allowed him space for self-acceptance and self-esteem?

Working Lives

As an unmarried youth, Jack displays qualities that David appears to admire unreservedly, but which may disquiet some present-day readers. Jack plays a gross practical joke on his plumber-employer, Mr. Foley, which costs him his apprenticeship. At seventeen he is sexually confident and determined to “score”—“he saw sex early and clearly” (p. 51); Johnston uses the simile of a tomcat (p. 54). Jack has a colourful turn in abusive phrases, and his attitude to women, to put it mildly, is disrespectful: “‘If the Old Man had to saw Jean Harlow in halves,’ he said bitterly, “he’d damn’ well see to it that I got the half that talks” (p. 51). He also collects trophies of sexual conquests that are demeaning to the women involved (p. 55). He nevertheless remains attractive because of his immense gusto for life. David as narrator conveys this vibrancy in eating metaphors:

Anything he tackled was tackled with immense gusto, almost as if he had to eat life in huge gulps…while his appetite was strong…or before they cleared away the table. (p. 51)

The prospect of ‘landing a sheila’ would fill him with the same kind of gluttonous rapture as a second or third helping of his favourite food, which continued to be Mother’s steamed jam roly-poly. (p. 52)

What is the sub-text of such metaphors? Do they imply a negative comment on Jack’s attitude, as reducing what might be a source of emotional and even spiritual fulfilment to its grossest physical level? Or is Jack’s attitude to sex and women to be expected and condoned as natural in an adolescent boy? After all, love and marriage later produce a major change in him.

A further point is that Jack at this early stage of his life is in revolt against “wowsers,” defined in his terms on page 53. He calls David a “wowser” because of his sexual bashfulness, stemming in part from his pimples and “skeletonic shape” (p. 53). The reader may want to ask if Jack’s put-downs of David, including his fear that David might be led into homosexuality, stem from sibling rivalry and an intuition that David wields a creative intelligence that is not one of his own gifts. David departs early from the model of young Australian manhood approved in the period by being a reader. He and his three friends persist in reading great books by international authors. David describes this as “groping and pretending” (p. 57). In other words, this group perseveres in exploring life’s possibilities in a rational if painful and limited way. From this David begins to intuit that writing is his vocation, but initially he sees his writing, which he conceals from Jack, as a sign that he lacks the natural confidence and enthusiasm that his brother displays: “I was setting out to try to side-step a world I didn’t have the courage to face” (p. 58). David also believes that using his imagination and giving time to writing established a pattern of fearful evasion that he was to follow “for years to come” (p. 58).

All of these contrasts contribute to David’s feeling that he is by nature inferior to his brother. He lacks Jack’s enthusiasm for living, because he sees more drawbacks. His personality does not match the values of the culture in which he grows up. However how much substance is there to justify his conviction that Jack is the better young man, and he himself is a moral failure?

David the Young Writer

When apprenticed as a lithographer at the Klebendorf factory, David’s feeling of being inferior is deepened by contrast with the conscientious, generous and talented Young Joe, who at work takes his brother’s place as a foil to David’s conscience. By skipping the afternoon and night art and painting classes needed for his lithography training, David betrays the trust of kindly, admirable, tactful people. However, in a moment that he calls “the enlightenment” (p. 73), he realises that he wants to write about the old sailing ship days. He sends his first article to the Morning Post, under the pen name of Stunsail. Chapter 5 ends: “I was fifteen. And I was a writer. Lonely and secretive, and desperately anonymous, but still a writer” (p. 75). David has brought into the light the secret power that had been hidden from him by his sense of inferiority to Jack. A question to be asked is: How forgivable are the betrayals that he has committed on his way to this goal?

David’s Dishonesties

These betrayals have mainly to do with David’s apprenticeship at Klebendorf’s lithography firm. He falsely claims as his own the work of  a fellow apprentice, Young Joe. He skips classes; in one episode claims as his own work that Young Joe and his father have completed in three hours of hard overtime; he steals two good studies from Young Joe which ensure his graduation to the Life Class in painting; forges a painting of the Grafton for his grandmother’s birthday; and buys an old Remington typewriter with a £5 birthday present that his mother intended him to spend on paints. David’s energy becomes focused on his creative work at home rather than on his ineptitude at work. However, his sense becomes entrenched as a source of lifelong pain—read the paragraph beginning, “In childhood and adolescence…” (p. 83). How do you as a reader respond to a character who judges his own petty defections so savagely?

In Lectures Two and Three we’ll trace David’s and Jack’s development through the novel.  We may be able to convince ourselves that David’s harsh judgement of himself and admiration for his brother are justified.

LECTURE TWO: MANHOOD

When David and Jack Meredith were growing up in suburban Melbourne during World War I, their parents’ absence overseas profoundly affected their boyhood and family life in suburban Melbourne. The brothers developed opposite responses to the war and to their father’s brutality. Jack adopted a  heroic approach: “Even if you can’t bloody win you still got to have a go” (p. 31). He became a larrikin (teenage tearaway), often in fights, chasing girls for sex and playing pranks on his employer. He approached life with a consuming energy. By contrast, David’s imagination and sensitivity meant that he experienced mostly fear. His chosen vocations of writer and journalist allowed him to avoid close ties and involvement. He blames himself, in contrast with Jack, for dishonesties and petty theft, and emerges from childhood with an inferiority complex. He especially feels that he is morally inferior to his brother and to the kindly, honest staff who practice their craft and lead blameless lives at Klebendorf’s.

As David and Jack mature to adulthood and their differences deepen, the reader begins to agree with David’s evaluation of himself as morally inferior. A way to understand the contrast between the brothers is to think of Jack as representing the traditional heroic ideal of an Australian man–a fighter and a sportsman who is also at home in the bush. Jack is the sort of character admired in A. B. Paterson’s ballad, The Man from Snowy River. David on the other hand represents twentieth-century suburban man, a later figure in history. Written postwar, My Brother Jack can be further understood as the product of a society undergoing an ideological transition between the bush and the city. (Most Australians have always lived in towns and cities, so I’m talking about an internal, not a physical transition.) Manhood ideals did not keep up with this transition. Indeed, many Australians found it was difficult if not impossible to choose the mundane rather than the adventurous, to prefer the suburban over the soldierly, or to value brains more than courage and physical strength and skills. Jack embodies the old ideal, for which so much nostalgia was felt, while David represents the “new man” who is effective in business, a wielder of words rather than weapons, but morally indifferent or bankrupt. David wears a business suit, not bush gear; the romantic turned-up hat of the Australian soldier—bushmen volunteers—with its badge of the rising sun is not for him.

Before the Depression

Chapter Seven of My Brother Jack deals with the year 1928. Thrown out by his father after bringing home a Remington typewriter, David seeks refuge with the painter Sam Burlington, an attractive, original and unconventional young man. While David stays with Sam, Jack “holds the fort” (looks after their mother and helps financially) at home. At the end of the chapter, David offers to return so that Jack can take up a job in the Wimmera, a decision that underlines Jack’s connection with bush tradition. David makes his offer partly out of an altruistic wish to help his brother, but his refined moral sense also leads him to blame himself for having done it “on a kind of false basis”(p. 116). The fact is that he wanted to go home anyway!

Sam is yet another character to whom David feels morally inferior. The murder of Sam’s girlfriend, Jessica Wray, lands David in yet another moral dilemma. When the police question him, David fails to defend what he knows is Sam’s integrity. He does not say how unlikely it is that this gentle, intelligent man would ever have murdered anyone. For days before his interview, David is full of anxiety. He’s determined to avoid involvement (p. 135). There’s a sense of St Peter denying that he knew Christ in David’s interview. The reader can see that, just as when he was a child, David is governed by fear. This may stem from early trauma, made worse by David’s powerful imagination. David lacks the confidence and courage that men like Jack naturally possess.

 Sam is cleared of the murder charge when the record of Jessica’s phone call to him is found, but Sam’s life and reputation have been ruined. When David visits him in his flat, he is “shrunken, forlorn and emptied-out, drained of busy-ness and importance” (p. 142). Sam never recovers his wonderful sense of humour. He gives up on his ambition to realise his talent for painting and goes to live permanently in Provence, France. When David visits him years later, he finds a man who has lost hope and heart. David therefore assumes a further load of guilt for not speaking up for Sam. His omission denied their friendship and was a poor return for the protection and kindness that Sam bestowed generously when David needed them. By this stage, David also feels guilty because he is a success. In contrast with Sam, he has realised his talent, in his case as a writer. You might like to consider whether David’s guilt about his treatment of Sam is rational. Is he being fair when he blames himself for Sam’s failure?

During the Depression

Graphically evoking Australia in the Depression, Chapter Nine is the most memorable chapter of My Brother Jack (pp. 152-54). For David the Depression is a lucky break, because he surrenders his apprenticeship and moves to a full-time job with the Morning Post. He describes this transition on p. 159, once again in guilt-ridden terms that may or may not be justified. David seems to be suffering from survivor guilt in relation to the Depression’s victims—the noble German Klebendorf’s workers, and Jack. (See David’s recognition of Klebendorf’s nobility, p. 156, which undermines the anti-German propaganda that he has known from boyhood; the episode deconstructs the notion of “enemy.”) The only character who behaves worse than David in his own eyes is his father. Jack senior throws Sheila Delaney out of their home because she is a Catholic, and makes David screw a warning against beggars to the front gate. The fact that David doesn’t openly resist doing this may be another indication of moral bankruptcy.

By contrast, Jack, who has realised that Sheila is the love of his life, suffers from the Depression in the way many working men did. He loses his job in the Wimmera, and has to borrow £50 from David so that he and Sheila can find somewhere other than home to live. Rather than take sustenance (“susso,” or work for the dole) Jack confronts the Depression head-on. He goes out bush prospecting for gold, conforming to yet another Australian masculine archetype that survived into and past World War II–that of the lean Australian “digger.” Outlined on p. 162, Jack’s adventures are a key to what he stands for. He returns from his first prospecting venture with an Aspirin bottle filled with gold flakes. When, after prospecting further afield in South America, he returns home a second time, he is near death from exposure, starvation, exhaustion and fever. Jack’s heroic endurance, the pride that forbids him to go on the “susso,” contrasts with the comfortable, upwardly mobile life that David has been making for himself in the meantime.

Gender Assumptions

The publication of My Brother Jack in 1964 preceded the insights and social and legal changes introduced to Australia by Second Wave feminism, a movement that began in the late ’sixties and early ’seventies with the publication of (among many others) Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique (USA) and Germaine Greer’s The Female Eunuch (Australia). My Brother Jack provides a snapshot of common attitudes towards women in Australia before 1960. Jack’s comment about the bottom half of Jean Harlow, repeated later about Mae West, suggests (at best) disrespect. The newspaper reporting of Jessica Wray’s murder, and the comments by the men on the train (pp. 122-25) seem to capture a basic Australian misogyny. My Brother Jack assumes that women are adjectival to men: that their place in the world and their self-respect depends on their relationships with husbands or lovers, and with their children. This assumption underlies the construction of of the novel’s three main women characters: Min,  Sheila,; and Helen.

1. Min

Jack and David’s mother was born into a wealthy and genteel family that she abandoned to marry her tram driver husband. Like other characters, Min ends up defeated by life, knitting endless clothing for her family and balaclavas and socks for the troops as a way of avoiding confronting her own oppression. My Brother Jack traces Min’s descent into victimhood: she is abused verbally and physically by her husband. “Mother’s” single adventure outside of the wifely mould, when she saw overseas service as a nurse in World War I, is silently condemned as having harmed the development of her two sons. It’s a further comment on the masculinist orientation of My Brother Jack, so taken for granted as not to be noticeable (“naturalised”), that while we hear quite a lot about Jack and David’s brother-in-law, Bert, we hear very little about their sister Jean, Bert’s wife. We hear even less about their mysterious younger sister, Marjorie (p. 23).

 2. Sheila

Sheila is Jack’s heroic female opposite: “One thing was sure, seeing him with Sheila. Jack was mated. Their characters in fact were much alike—they had the same loyalties, audacities, obstinacies, prides, the same strong and frank sexuality” (163). Her strength is summed up in her first description: “she insisted on being accepted for what she was, and not as people thought she should be” (145). Sheila’s sexuality appears in the way she dresses and behaves. Her heroism emerges when, after Jack has gone bush in search of work and she finds herself pregnant, she doesn’t crawl to the Merediths for help, but goes back to Moonee Ponds to share a room with her cousin. When she is called back after Jack seems about to die, she isn’t afraid to confront old Mr. Meredith (168).

Johnston sets Sheila up as the ideal Australian woman; she really is the epitome of sheilahood—“a sheila called Sheila” (144). A country girl, and like Jack traditionally Australian, Sheila willingly leaves her home in Dimboola to be with Jack. Even though she is a devout Catholic, she is willing to live “in sin” with him. First and foremost she is a “man’s woman,” and only the sexually inhibited David finds their relationship embarrassing. Sheila’s determination to place Jack’s needs first is seen in her unwed pregnancy. Single mothers were subject to heavy moral condemnation in Australia until well into the 1970s. Sheila’s giving birth to Sharon while unmarried would have been seen in the prewar years as shameful. Her self-sacrificing loyalty to Jack continues to the end—although she’s happy for herself when he is ruled unfit for overseas soldiering, she puts this feeling aside in favour of Jack’s fulfilment and happiness.

3. Helen Midgeley

If, like Jack, Sheila embodies some old-fashioned Australian country values, Helen, like David, exemplifies values associated with upward-mobility and the mid-twentieth-century suburban sprawl. Four years older, Helen initiates David sexually, but lacks the genuine eroticism that Sheila commands. Where Sheila is slim but rounded, growing matronly but retaining her attractiveness as time passes, Helen is tall and very slim—“she was prettier than Sheila but I qualified it by thinking that she was somehow not as warm-looking” (178). When conducting her affair with David after-hours in the library, Helen has far left-wing political opinions which David regards as naïve, but which he accepts (194). He wants to understand the complexities of the international situation, rather than to accept clichés and generalisations about it. After Helen marries David, she abandons her socialist principles totally, and fulfils the outward ideal of a suburban wife. A further point of contrast with Sheila is that Helen has no desire for motherhood. She clearly revels in artifice, conformity and pretence, but she also enjoys her relationship with David for what it is. She wants a stage on which to perform the role of upwardly-mobile wife. Chapter 10 introduces Helen as a femme fatale. Ironically, her pursuit of David is clear to the reader, but less so to him. The disastrous birthday party for David’s mother in Chapter 11 dramatises the many differences between those men and women who belonged to an older family-oriented Australia, and the new “smart” values that flowed in after the War.

It can nevertheless be argued that Helen doesn’t deserve the reader’s condemnation any more than David does. Both have been shaped by social forces, though both also made choices, often driven by ambition or fear, which aided their shaping. One thing, however, points to the persistence of a strand of misogyny in My Brother Jack. Although David as narrator hates himself and feels guilt both for his selfish actions and for his good luck, he hates and blames his wife Helen very much more.

LECTURE THREE: SUBURBIA AND WAR, ROUND 2

In our lectures to date we’ve traced the lives of Jack and David Meredith into the Depression of the early 1930s. We’ve questioned the reliability of David’s judgments as narrator about himself and others. We’ve also suggested that Jack represents older bush-based Australian values and that David represents the new urban and suburban Australian man. At the end of Lecture Two we considered assumptions about gender made in My Brother Jack, as these appear in female characters and assumptions about women and their roles.

Suburban Life Round Two

Chapter 12’s parody of suburban life raises the issue of whether David is an intellectual snob. This comes out in his characterisation of Wally and Sandra Solomon as “perhaps the two most stupid human beings I have ever known” (241–their surname is ironic). However, primarily David revolts against the conformity of suburbia, its carefully constructed friendships, and its intellectual and artistic sterility. Helen guides him in accepting these values for a time, and David has only limited access to people with different values. The outsiders who rarely or never visit include Jack and Sheila and David’s parents. The cosmetic artificiality and lack of true creativity or productivity in Johnston’s version of suburbia is summed up in the perfectly cooked meals that Helen serves to their regular guests, especially the pickled onions on toothpicks—these are all coloured differently but taste the same. The dinner party of steak and kidney pie at Gavin and Peggy Turley’s decaying mansion finally awakens David to the contrasting barrenness of his own existence. He longs for a more productive intellectual life.  Gavin’s modest literary critical publication, D. H. Lawrence in Australia exemplifies what David himself might achieve.

As narrator, David describes with passionate satiric detestation the suburbia (Beverley Grove) in which both he and Helen come to realise that they are imprisoned. Light dawns for David through such episodes as the rearranging of his study, his revelation while on the roof, and the purchase of his sugar gum tree. There seems to be no way out of his miserable marriage, bound as it is by a house mortgage and hire-purchase agreements.

At first Helen is amazed when David reacts against the world that she has created for them. David begins to undermine their relationship, not by confrontation, but by stealth. He despises himself for practising petty cruelties, but seems unable to stop. Finally forced to dig up his huge and fertile tree, a powerful symbolic protest against what he sees as their stultifying life in Beverley Grove, he speaks some heartless truths that at last collapse Helen’s unshakable mature poise (283).

• A question for you to consider is whether it is fair to call David’s representation of suburbia a parody (i.e. falsified by satiric exaggerations). Alternatively, how accurate is his representation? Compare and contrast this middle-class suburbia with the working-class suburbia of David’s childhood.

War Years

For David the commencement of hostilities is a blessing, because it allows him to escape from the unhappy domestic scene into his work. For Jack it is also a blessing, in that he sees it unconsciously as an opportunity for his final self-realisation as a man and hero by taking part in the adventure of war. Johnston analyses this “mythic pull,” finding its basis in the vast Australian inland, from which he says explorers have always retreated. Australian men have therefore, he says, turned their attention to overseas arenas—”[The Australian] is, because the merciless quality of his own land dictates it to him, the soldier of far fortune” (286). When David visits Jack during infantry training, he finds him changed: “he had fined down to the ‘essential Jack’…. I saw that this was not only that he looked as Jack should look, but he looked as a proper man should look” (291). So despite the horrors so powerfully described in early chapters as resulting from the first war, it appears that the second war may offer both brothers an opportunity for fulfilment.

But in fact they experience opposite outcomes. Jack’s opportunity for fulfilling his nature as a soldier comes to nothing when his injuries mean that he is denied overseas service. Although David has belatedly tried to secure an overseas posting for Jack, his efforts have failed—in the Northern Territory Jack is hurt again and posted back to Melbourne. During the War he goes through a gradual, agonising decline, losing self-confidence and self-respect, and even  his sense of himself as a man (322).

As just one in a series of climactic events, Johnston makes Jack’s and David’s nostalgic visit to the new, transformed Klebendorf factory coincide with their visit to the pier where, at the beginning of the novel, as small boys, they witnessed their father’s return from World War I. In this sequence we learn of Young Joe’s death in World War II and his father’s terrible grief. These amount to another bitter comment on the miseries of war. However, the news of Young Joe’s death is juxtaposed with the account of the march that Jack and David watch soon after, a description that recalls the ideal of the young, bronzed heroic Australian soldiers, “the men of the far adventure, the soldiers of far fortune” (361). Yet David associates this ideal with “an awful and irremediable sense of loss” (362). (Loss of the heroic ideal? Loss of good men in the War? Jack’s loss in not being one of the fighting soldiers?) According to David, these men have been “marching through my whole life” (363). This sequence of events and responses sums up the novel’s complex representation of war.

It’s at this point too that Jack reaches his nadir. David realises that Jack is walking with a limp—something that he’d resisted doing previously: “the screw turned tighter as I realised that he had given up” (362). In other words, this is no longer the Jack whose motto was: “Even if you can’t bloody win you still got to have a go.” As a final humiliation, he turns to David as a substitute for the dignity and achievement that he has been denied—“I had become his vicarious adventure. I was his brother Davy!” (365).

By contrast David has had a “successful” war from the very beginning. He joins the forces late, and as a correspondent, not a combatant. He describes how he follows Mr. Brewster’s advice and stays out of harm’s way. He takes the minimal risks required, for example while in New Guinea, to absorb the atmosphere of battle fields and bloodshed as the basis for his newspaper reports. The books that David writes during the war further his career. He finishes it as a famous writer and journalist.

The novel’s ending juxtaposes David’s “success” against Jack’s “failure.” David’s “successes” also coincide with the disasters that have overtaken Gavin Turley, a man he admires. Turley has lost his beloved wife Peggy, because when the false news came that he had been killed in battle, she died (or possibly committed suicide) in a car accident. In addition, although winning many medals, Turley has lost an arm after generously volunteering to fight in the ranks early in the War—another point of contrast with David. So many men come to grief in this novel, but David has a charmed life—his survivor’s guilt increases because he has known how to seize opportunities and make everything go his way.

Another triumph comes when, after David has had dinner with Turley and Cressida Morley, whom he meets by accident while on leave in Melbourne, it becomes clear that she is more interested in himself. He triumphs over Turley when Cressida agrees to meet him for dinner on his last night on leave. We then discover that David has experienced a final change—for the first time in his life he has fallen in love (366). As a final comment on the novel’s representation of women, we might pause here for a moment to consider Cressida’s characterisation. Which features distinguish her from Sheila and Helen? (boyishness, youth, adventurousness, a reader of the English classic novel, Tristram Shandy?)

David’s triumphs over Jack and Turley coincide with an escalation of his guilt. Perhaps Johnston is making a point about the nature of success—Is success, even including success in sexual matters, distinct from happiness? We have seen that David experiences both survivor guilt and ordinary guilt. He has pursued his ambitions and his erotic attraction to Cressida without much concern for Turley or Jack—at least if he feels it, his concern has not affected his behaviour. His selfishness is finally encapsulated when he fails to return to Jack’s party, even though he realises that he could do this easily. Instead he goes ahead with his date with Cressida (367). (Perhaps it is relevant that Shakespeare’s Cressida is not a faithful lover.)

The Ending

Like many a romantic novel, My Brother Jack ends with the meeting of a man and woman. As Shakespeare tells Twelfth Night audiences, “journeys end in lovers’ meeting.” However, David’s triumph in love—he also wins out over the nine “wolves” who are circling Cressida—is hollowed out by guilt and moral failure. The “modern,” “coming” Australian man has won. Life has defeated Jack, the traditional bushie and fighter. This is inevitable, because David is a man suited to the present and future. Even so, My Brother Jack looks back with longing to the values of an older Australia, represented by Jack and Turley. David’s abiding discontent invites us to see the transition away from these values as a tragic loss.