Dorothy Johnston
Welcome to the website of an Australian author of literary and crime fiction.
November 20, 2024 — 21:01
Author: Dorothy Johnston Category: Uncategorized Comments: 0
I’m an occasional poet, which means that I occasionally write poetry and also that certain occasions seem to ask for a poem. ‘Second hand bookshop under lockdown’ is one of these. My first piece of published writing was a poem in a magazine called ‘Digger’ back in the 1970s. It was about the women’s movement. I haven’t kept it and I can’t recall it which is probably just as well. After long decades of writing prose, poems still come to me from time to time. I am seldom satisfied with the metre but have decided not to worry about that.
Second hand bookshop under lockdown.
The books form towers, in shadows
by the doorway and around the walls.
We are here, they say, our words are here.
Our spines face outwards to the dim room and closed door.
We are not arranged by date or author,
but known to the old man who has given us a home.
For many years I have been a customer,
coming in from the hot light of Hesse Street
in summer, or in winter,
having crossed the road against the slanting rain.
Always it has been the same inside,
the same smell, old and welcoming.
The owner sits outside on a wooden bench,
eating an ice-cream, affecting nonchalance.
I take a few steps forward, then ask, ‘Are you open?’
‘I might be,’ he says.
I stand on a chair and read titles with difficulty
in the corner furthest from the door.
If I were so rash as to choose one
from near the bottom of a pile
and attempt to remove it,
all those above would fall down and crush me.
It would be a way to go, I think.
For a wordsmith like myself, not a bad way to go.
The owner has come in, still eating his ice-cream
as though it were some kind of prophylactic
or excuse. ‘How are you coping?’ he asks.
I turn awkwardly, careful not to dislodge
by even a puff of breath, the tower
which seems to me a statement in itself.
‘I’m alright,’ I say. ‘And you?’
‘I’m a bit lost,’ he says.
I nod and point. ‘I’ll have that one.’
It’s not the old friend I imagined finding and re-reading,
but in a bookshop under lockdown beggars can’t be choosers.
We exchange a glance. The old man, keeping his distance, smiles.
The libraries are all shut, of course,
and the proper bookshop up the road.
I pay the princely sum of seven dollars
and leave with my purchase underneath my arm.
Can books transmit the virus?
I hope not. Can I catch it by touching any one of them?
I believe not, but will wash my hands in case.
I realise I wasn’t watching the old man
get down the book I wanted without causing an avalanche.
No doubt he has his methods.
I would like to turn back and ask, but do not.
Instead I climb into my car and drive home.
The Ferry and the Kelp Forest
The ferry pulls away from the wharf,
its ballast mostly cars with picnic baskets,
rugs from a bygone era.
Et In Arcadia Ego
I have often thought of that, mulled over what it meant –
the skulls beneath the bow wave –
a shallow crossing, save for the shipping channel.
Who would be so bold as to imagine
a foothold on the earth sufficed, let alone a grave?
How deep is a fathom?
Learnt in school, the measurements;
the song came later.
No coral bones at the bottom of the channel,
where the ebb tide sucks
and the branches of the kelp forest
stretch towards the open sea and whisper, ‘Come.’
Every hour on the hour, the ferry, boasting punctuality,
takes off. Passengers leave their cars
and climb to the upper deck.
‘Look,’ one says, ‘an albatross.’
‘A gannet,’ I wish to correct, and may do in a moment.
‘They have a nesting colony out here.’
Why wish good luck on us? Or luck of any kind.
We have slipped our ties, or may do any moment.
The wind makes music with the current beneath,
the arms that catch and hold a man against the tide.
I retrieve coins from my pocket, but there’s no one to pay.
No ferryman or woman, their uniforms the same –
their shapes too, from a distance. An indifferent crew.
The captain on the bridge knows where we’re going.
But oh, how lightly breath holds here!
How lightly it might slip away.
There would be alarm, a cry,
for nowhere is hidden on the ferry.
There would be lifeboats, a search,
the schedule interrupted.
Waiting passengers would be talking on their mobile phones.
The kelp’s arms and the bones of dolphins –
would escape be quick enough?
Et in arcadia ego: in the midst of life is death;
in the midst of death, life continues.
What’s one more breath, after all?
Leaning over the Rail
Over the railing,
a blur of dancing water
sucks up and drinks the light.
Commerce has it covered.
Out beyond the headland
the container waits,
so long that, end to end,
stretched the other way,
it would fill the shipping channel.
An orange pilot boat
makes merry with the flood tide
that keeps larger craft at bay.
Too far away
for the naked eye to grasp,
a ladder skims and bounces
down the mother vessel’s flank.
It’s calm. The pilot climbs.
Despite a fluoro jacket
the waves might take him if he fell.
It’s happened more than once,
above stormy seas, in the dark of night.
The driver and the able seaman watch.
One smokes. The other looks up
at the container’s rim.
He thinks he sees a line of heads;
but who’d be peering now, over the railing,
to mark a commonplace event?
There are photographs in the museum.
In one, a man crawls spider-like,
but with no encircling web,
his destination lost in blackness,
while below his men wait.
Melbourne’s hours away.
A story, passed down through the centuries,
tells of a boy who fell much further,
dousing flaming wings.
Do these men know it?
The driver guns his engine,
prepares to turn away,
with the tide now, shoreward,
while the ship absorbs the man
who vanishes, hauling himself inside.
Kerosene Jack
A treasure map was tattooed on Jack’s arm.
When he showed them, in the pub,
they grinned and shook their heads
and humoured him.
Belief was something else.
One stayed back to talk,
to study, through black hairs,
a railway line, a cave;
to ask, without appearing to be interested,
‘What’s in there, d’you reckon?’
Gold and statues from a pirate ship.
The whole town knew the story.
Where did the tattoo come from?
Jack couldn’t say exactly.
The man who’d asked went home, thoughtful,
to his wife. Next day he borrowed spades,
a drill. The way up was crumbling, sandy,
entrance marked by Moonah roots.
Above it, creepers coiled, exotic
and successful. An unlikely pair, these two,
The one who wore the map –
who spoke of visions in the night –
the fisherman a sceptic
in the ordinary run of things.
His wife sighed, pulling damper from the over.
Why had Jack, that troublemaker,
Fixed her man in his sights?
The climb up was awkward.
The fisherman’s right knee ached.
He stopped to rest and looked down
at his borrowed drill.
He rubbed his knee, and saw the town
disappear behind a sea mist,
then hurried to catch up.
From the shore, a boy called out in alarm.
The search party made it to the landslide,
the cave that had collapsed in on itself
and buried the two men.
Trust Jack to do something mad.
But the fisherman, they said,
ought to have known better
than to follow a map into a hill.
The boy who’d sounded the alarm
climbed up and up, deaf to his mother’s calls.
He hauled on vines till he was at the top,
above the cave, looking out to sea,
the way pirates came
with treasure from Peru.
The life of art
For it is contained there,
perfect in its imperfection,
in each leaf that has a heart,
so ordinary and numerous
that no painter would think to paint them.
Within the ordinary –
within ordinary objects –
for the most part not considered worth a second look –
there remains a work of art,
surprising in its stillness and its movement.
A stone, after rain,
Is both rounded and made sharp.
It stands out from a multitude of others on the road.
Of all the leaves along the path each one is singled out.
No one need paint these, or record them,
but if one has a mind to,
a mind harassed and sullied
by the troubles of the day,
a heart still beating for all that –
if one has such a mind and heart,
then one might both begin and end
with ordinary leaves and stones,
might make a space for them
in a work of art.
Divje Babe – womens’ cave
Music pierces the ancient darkness,
the sound of a bone flute
and of women singing.
In amongst the women there are girls,
high voices breaking up.
A baby cries.
It is 60,000 years ago,
enough that the cave gives shelter, warmth,
a safe place to sleep.
What of music then?
A small girl listens intently,
watching in the firelight.
When the woman puts the flute down on a ledge,
she picks it up, holds it to her mouth.
She is too small to make much of a sound,
but looks around, fearing harsh words
or a slap. The musician is watching her
in the light of the fire.
For a moment there is silence.
No one speaks. The baby has stopped crying.
The musician smiles and moves over to the ledge.
She shows the young girl
where to put her fingers,
how to blow.
The girl nods, intent and serious.
She doesn’t have the strength yet,
but it will come.
November 11, 2024 — 5:20
Author: Dorothy Johnston Category: Uncategorized Comments: 0
Several years ago, I led a group on a literary walk around Queenscliff, visiting some of the places where my sea-change mysteries are set. These include the Royal Hotel, which did duty as both a morgue and an insane asylum during the 1800s, and Henry Handel Richardson’s house in Mercer Street, where the author lived as a child. Queenscliff is not unique in having a rich literary history, and it is being added to all the time.
Now Hilary Stennett of the Queenscliff library has put together a walking map and hosted a very successful inaugural tour. As well as my novels, the walk includes, on the fiction side, The Broken Wave by Matthew Ryan Davies, Benito’s Gold by Bob Menzies and The Fortunes of Richard Mahony. There are non-fiction sites to visit as well, including Murder at the Fort.
Maps are available in all the Geelong Regional libraries. The walk takes about an hour, and Hilary plans more guided tours in the future.
Thanks to Hilary, Gillian Elijah and the Geelong Regional Library Corporation for making it possible.
July 28, 2023 — 2:34
Author: Dorothy Johnston Category: Uncategorized Comments: 0
In a few weeks’ time I will be taking part in the Local Word festival in Geelong, and speaking about my novel One for the Master. I’ll be joining a panel of writers who have set their works on, and been influenced by, Geelong, the Bellarine Peninsula and the Surf Coast – speaking broadly, Wadawurrung Country. The panel will comprise actor and playwright Tom Molyneux, Sudanese writer Kgshak Akec, and myself, with panel chair, Rhett Davis.
One for the Master tells the story of the collapse of the woollen industry in Geelong. Geelong used to be called the Bradford of the south, and this old, dirty, proud industrial city was the one I was born and grew up in, in the 1950s and 60s.
My family first lived in West Geelong, then moved across the river to Belmont, within walking distance of the Barwon River. My sister and I used to escape down there to a place we called the swamp. Swampy it was, muddy and marshy on the river bank. It was wild and lonely and we seldom saw anybody else. It would never have occurred to our parents that we needed adult supervision or accompaniment.
Many years later, after I had moved first to Melbourne then to Canberra, I came back for a visit and was staying at my parents’ house with my daughter, then a toddler. I decided to take her for a walk in the pram along the river bank. It was a misty morning, autumnal, cool. We watched the mist rising from the river. After we’d gone a little further, I noticed huge shapes appearing out of the mist. I knew them to be part of an abandoned woollen mill. It looked ruined, ghostly, yet it had its own kind of dignity. I wondered why no one had pulled it down and built something else, the land along the river surely being valuable.
I began talking to my father about the ruin. His older sister had once worked in a woollen mill. I tried to talk to her as well, but she wasn’t keen to re-live her experiences. My father had lived all his life in Geelong and had a wide circle of acquaintances. It was through them, and through the fine resources of the National Wool Museum, that I began building up a picture of what life had been like in the mills. I heard stories of women’s hair being pulled out by the machines, of being scalped, of constant back pain, of the paternalistic approach of the mill owners, which had its good and bad side, then of the demise of the industry. Synthetics took over from wool. Then came the tariff reforms of the 1970s.
One for the Master is fiction. It does not set out to give a definitive account of life in Geelong’s woollen mills. Though loosely based on the Returned Soldiers Mill, my mill is an imaginary place, peopled with characters that grew out of my imagination. I would not have written it had it not been for that morning in the mist, and I certainly wouldn’t have written it had I not had access to the first hand accounts of working life held in the wool museum. Once begun, though, the novel took on a life of its own.
One for the Master was first published in 1997 and shortlisted for the 1998 Miles Franklin Award. It has recently been re-published as part of the Untapped Project, for which I am very grateful.
March 14, 2023 — 5:08
Author: Dorothy Johnston Category: Uncategorized Comments: 3
The Untapped project is a marvellous initiative which gives readers access to long lost books in both print and digital form.
More than 150 titles are available to borrow from libraries and to purchase. Partners in the project include the Australian Society of Authors, National State and Territory Libraries, the Australian Library and Information Association and Ligature Press.
Amongst those 150 titles are the 7 Writers Anthology, Canberra Tales, first published by Penguin in 1988.
This article, published in the Canberra Times today, April 15, tells the story of how 7 Writers came into existence, and how we continued meeting as a writers’ group for over 15 years.
My novel, One for the Master, published by Wakefield Press in 1997 and short-listed for the 1998 Miles Franklin Award, has also been re-published as part of the Untapped Project .
It’s wonderful to be able to hold this long out of print novel in my hands again. Thanks to all those involved in the project, in particular Airlie Lawson and publisher Matt Rubinstein.
September 23, 2021 — 5:58
Author: Dorothy Johnston Category: Uncategorized Comments: 0
The Lodeman is the fourth book in my sea-change mystery series set in Queenscliff, Victoria. It was to have been launched in October 2021, but the launch has had to be postponed until February next year.
It’s about the death of a sea pilot. Lodeman is an old word for pilot or navigator, from the same root as lodestar, meaning a star that is steered by.
My lodeman is washed up on the shores of Port Phillip Bay.
The Port Phillip Sea Pilots have a long, honourable tradition of piloting ships through the treacherous Port Phillip heads and in to Melbourne. It seems almost a crime against nature when one of them, respected Captain Delraine, is found dead by drowning on the beach close to their operation centre. Queenscliff constable Chris Blackie would have had little to do with the investigation into Captain Delraine’s death but for the fact that a friend of his found the body.
A Detective Sergeant looking for easy answers spurs Chris Blackie to ask questions behind the sergeant’s back and to uncover corruption, greed and high-running passions before the case is solved.
September 27, 2020 — 3:51
Author: Dorothy Johnston Category: Uncategorized Comments: 0
In 1983, when West Block was first released, there had been very little prose fiction set in Australia’s national capital. The first published novel to be set in Canberra was Plaque With Laurel, by M.Barnard Eldershaw, the pen name of Marjorie Barnard and Flora Eldershaw. It appeared in 1937. TAG Hungerford’s Riverslake was published in 1953, then there is a gap of twenty-four years till Robert Macklin’s The Paper Castle in 1977. Blanche d’Alpuget’s Turtle Beach, 1981, was followed two years later by Sara Dowse’s West Block. West Block was and remains a pioneering work.
In Ric Throssell’s biography of his mother, Katharine Susannah Prichard, he notes her comment that Canberra was ‘like a town made by Pinocchio. All that neatness and prettiness, so far removed from the struggle for existence.’
Prichard’s view was a false one, as people who have lived in Canberra for any length of time will know, but probing beneath the false view, forging a place for Canberra in Australian literature, took courage and effort, and was quite often received with a hostility which may seem strange to readers in 2020.
I consider it a privilege to review a re-issue of West Block almost forty years after its first release. The novel is as timely now as it was in the 1980s, combining, as it does, unforgettable insights into the workings of federal politics with an imaginative study of flawed human lives.
West Block begins with a prologue dated December 1977, then is divided into five sections, taking readers into the hearts of five very different characters.
George Harland has risen to a senior position in the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet and has served for more than two decades under Coalition governments, compared with only three under Labor, these three being the Whitlam years. His commitment is to the smooth running of government, rather than policies or political visions. Then his daughter Marion announces she is leaving her husband and her two young sons. Her politics are far to the left of her father’s and George suddenly finds himself re-considering his life and the work which has formed such a large part of it. How far this re-consideration takes him is left for readers to decide.
The government is about to decide whether or not to open a new uranium mine. Henry Beeker, lower in the hierarchy than George Harland, but still a senior, experienced public servant, brings all his skill and intelligence to bear on ensuring that the decision is a responsible one. A trip to Brussels almost ends in disaster, while back home, Beeker and others work through draft after draft of their submission. Then they have to face the Cabinet.
Catherine Duffy is caught up in the chaos that was Saigon as the city fell to the North Vietnamese. Catherine has got to know a number of Vietnamese refugees as part of her work with overseas students, and become friends with one family in particular. In 1975 she is sent to Saigon to assist with the evacuation of children, and is able, through an act of personal courage, to help one of her friend’s relatives to escape.
Economist Jonathan Roe seeks compromise with the hard-liners in his own department, as well as in Treasury. A personal crisis threatens to undo him, but his outlook on life is profoundly changed by the birth of a child.
And Cassie Armstrong, head of the small, dedicated Women’s Equality Branch, watches as their ability to bring about change for women is eroded and side-lined. Exhausted and demoralised, Cassie finally reaches breaking point.
West Block, the building, is the novel’s sixth protagonist, containing a host of minor characters as well as the main ones. In her Author’s Note, prefacing the new edition, Dowse says, ‘the building itself galvanised me. The minute I walked into it I wanted to write its story, but now that I was in a position to, I was up against the prejudice against Canberra, most particularly Canberra’s public service.’
Dowse began working in West Block when she joined Prime Minister and Cabinet to head their inaugural Women’s Affairs Section, where she remained until 1977. She resigned in protest after the unit was moved to another department.
Readers first meet West Block on a summer night when ‘the naked white building stood out like an iceberg on a northern sea’. Collapse is imminent, but we must wait to discover why.
In lyrical prose and images that are crystal clear, Dowse celebrates Canberra’s physical beauty through each markedly different season. ‘Russet leaves brushed against the window. The fog had lifted; the sun shone white and gold.’ Autumn gives way to winter and winter to spring, while inside the departments and the Parliament, bureaucrats who genuinely believe their role is to serve the public struggle against bitter disappointment.
In this beautifully produced new edition, Dowse’s voice speaks to readers across the decades, in a voice that is at once intimate, authoritative, sad, and yet hopeful too.
This review was published in the Canberra Times on September 26. As I say in my review it was a privilege to be asked to write about West Block and to revisit the novel after nearly forty years.
August 11, 2020 — 4:11
Author: Dorothy Johnston Category: Uncategorized Comments: 0
Here’s another lockdown poem, partner to one I wrote in an earlier post.
Smiling Behind Masks
with thanks to Marilyn Chalkley, who gave me the idea
Smiling behind masks
is becoming something of an art.
Smiles starting with the eyes
move downwards to a barrier
of cotton or of polyester,
a definite, clear line in daylight,
less so before sunrise
when I walk by the sea.
Masks cover more than half a face,
while the rest must carry
all expressions, or else hint at secret ones.
Smiling behind masks
is becoming something of an art.
People have chosen many shades,
from black to white, flowers and swirling abstracts,
football colours marking tribal loyalties.
Eyes speak, making up for hidden mouths,
for noses which might wrinkle at a joke well told.
A loosening of skin around the temples,
at the hairline, becomes a message
and a kind of grace.
Smiling behind masks
is becoming something of an art.
I wait beside the other sunrise walkers
staring at the place where sky meets sea.
My dog waits with me. Others, too, have dogs,
minding their own business.
Gold gathers strength on the horizon,
thrusting pink and grey aside.
I sigh behind my mask,
warm air captured then released.
The first morning, like the song says:
the first birds have spoken earlier, while it was still dark,
while I hurried to get ready; coat, then shoes, then this thing
that I breathe in and out behind,
as the gold bursts and the day says, here I am.
August 6, 2020 — 3:47
Author: Dorothy Johnston Category: Uncategorized Comments: 0
In these times of lockdown and uncertainty I am more grateful then ever for the shops that have supported me by selling my books, and by encouraging readers to try them. In this post I want to thank Karen and Paul for their help and enthusiasm. Karen and Paul run the Point Lonsdale newsagency and post office. Last summer it was Karen’s idea to have a book signing day outside the shop, which did very well. Thank you to this small business, and to all small businesses everywhere who support their local artists. The photo is of Karen and myself outside the shop.
June 3, 2020 — 3:19
Author: Dorothy Johnston Category: Uncategorized Comments: 0
I’m very pleased that my novel ‘Gerard Hardy’s Misfortune’ has been longlisted for the Sisters in Crime Davitt Award. Way back in the mists of time, the first of my Canberra crime novels, ‘The Trojan Dog’, was runner-up in the inaugural Davitt Award. Then there were relatively few entries. This year there were 124. Women’s crime fiction is powering ahead in Australia.
May 13, 2020 — 21:30
Author: Dorothy Johnston Category: Uncategorized Comments: 2
My prose muse had deserted me for the moment, but I’ve been writing poems. The first one is called Smiling from a distance.
Smiling from a distance
People smile at one another
from a distance on the beach.
I think we might perfect the shine of distant smiles.
‘Hello,’ we call. ‘Good morning, afternoon, or evening.’
It’s become suddenly important to mark passage,
mark the time, to speak, stranger to stranger
across a measured space.
Waves lift. Light dances on water, water drinks the light.
The beach is still open to walkers,
provided that they walk in ones or twos;
open to surfers sharing drop and curl.
While on the headland, there above me, silhouetted,
a paraglider’s stopped by police in uniform.
He would fly, or as near as he is able,
but stands grounded, his sail filled with air.
Inland, just a little way, my sister walks straight corridors,
locked inside a nursing home.
Yet on the phone she’s cheerful,
pleased that she can walk at all, while many can’t.
I send her a smile across the short, uncoverable distance
separating us. Imagining, I place my feet just so.
Can a smile be measured?
I think the answer is both yes and no.
One and a half metres, repeated like a mantra,
becomes a background to the everyday.
No need for tapes: the eye does just as well.
Four women in a park sit properly, legal distance well observed,
wearing coats and beanies, for the air is cold.
They call out; one laughs, raising her hand to join the conversation.
Across this open human space they smile.
Second hand bookshop under lockdown.
The books form towers, in shadows
by the doorway and around the walls.
We are here, they say, our words are here.
Our spines face outwards to the dim room and closed door.
We are not arranged by date or author,
but known to the old man who has given us a home.
For many years I have been a customer,
coming in from the hot light of Hesse Street
in summer, or in winter,
having crossed the road against the slanting rain.
Always it has been the same inside,
the same smell, old and welcoming.
The owner sits outside on a wooden bench,
eating an ice-cream, affecting nonchalance.
I take a few steps forward, then ask, ‘Are you open?’
‘I might be,’ he says.
I stand on a chair and read titles with difficulty
in the corner furthest from the door.
If I were so rash as to choose one
from near the bottom of a pile
and attempt to remove it,
all those above would fall down and crush me.
It would be a way to go, I think.
For a wordsmith like myself, not a bad way to go.
The owner has come in, still eating his ice-cream
as though it were some kind of prophylactic
or excuse. ‘How are you coping?’ he asks.
I turn awkwardly, careful not to dislodge
by even a puff of breath, the tower
which seems to me now a statement in itself.
‘I’m alright,’ I say. ‘And you?’
‘I’m a bit lost,’ he says.
I nod and point. ‘I’ll have that one.’
It’s not the old friend I imagined finding and re-reading,
but in a bookshop under lockdown beggars can’t be choosers.
We exchange a glance. The old man, keeping his distance, smiles.
The libraries are all shut, of course,
and the proper bookshop up the road.
I pay the princely sum of seven dollars
and leave with my purchase underneath my arm.
Can books transmit the virus?
I hope not. Can I catch it by touching any one of them?
I believe not, but will wash my hands in case.
I realise I wasn’t watching the old man
get down the book I wanted without causing an avalanche.
No doubt he has his methods.
I would like to turn back and ask, but do not.
Instead I climb into my car and drive home.
