A Literary Life

A century ago, as Australia recovered from World War I, BGS Old Boy Lieutenant Hector Dinning ’06 wrote a letter to The Bulletin advocating for a “distinctively Australian” brand of literature.

Mr Dinning, an author of two books about his war service in the battlefields of Europe and the Middle East, predicted that Australia would soon produce writers capable of capturing the young nation’s outlook and its characteristics.

“We have been too distracted getting ourselves settled, fighting for a crust, gaining a foothold in virgin land and founding cities to settle down to Letters,” Mr Dinning wrote. “But the time will come when the habit of literary activity will be achieved, too.”

Mr Dinning died in 1941, aged 54, but his literary desire would be fulfilled in large part by another BGS Old Boy, David Malouf AO.

During the second half of the 20th century, Malouf wrote dozens of books, short stories, essays, poems, plays and libretti, many of them winning national and international awards.

He is the only Australian to have won the Neustadt International Prize for Literature, a prestigious biennial award for poets, novelists and playwrights.

His nominating juror, the Arab American literary theorist Ihab Hassan, noted that Malouf helped introduce international readers to the “new cadences” and “fresh feelings” of a uniquely Australian English.

“No writer is more celebrated in the Antipodes than David Malouf,” wrote Hassan, adding that Malouf “serves as a measure of literary value everywhere.”

Malouf’s first novel, Johnno, was published in 1975. He wrote the final manuscript 50 years ago, in Italy, after a decade of failed attempts to get the story down in print.

Despite Malouf’s physical distance from Australia, Johnno was an effort to bring Brisbane to life and put his hometown on the map.

“We had almost no literature of our own that we could identify with,” Malouf said. “When we read Henry Lawson, or Banjo Patterson, that was about a kind of Australian that had nothing to do with the urban Australians we were.”

Through the lives of the characters Dante and Johnno, Malouf drew a vivid portrait of our subtropical city. Even after all these years, Malouf’s Brisbane still exists powerfully in the minds of readers, resonant for its natural beauty but also its cloying familiarity.

“One of the things that happens in that book is that Brisbane becomes the third major character,” he explained. “And the relationship with Brisbane that Johnno has on and off – that I have on and off – is something that holds the whole book together.”

Johnno is often heralded by critics as the classic Brisbane novel, and was recently featured in the ABC television series, ‘Books That Made Us’.

“Johnno, to anyone in Brisbane, is the gospel,” declares journalist and best-selling author Trent Dalton.

The story unfolds after Dante discovers a photo of “the class madcap” Johnno – based loosely on BGS Old Boy John Milliner ’50 – in an old school magazine.

And so, Malouf’s vast body of work begins at Brisbane Grammar School, among the Great Hall, the War Memorial Library, the New Building, and the “tree planted in the grounds by a Royal Duke, the son of Queen Victoria.”

The semi-autobiographical novel even mentions a legendary former BGS teacher, Mr ‘Soapy’ Allen, who taught Chemistry with flair and mild eccentricity.

As a student at BGS, Malouf immediately demonstrated his precocious talent, graduating in 1950 with prizes for Latin, English, Ancient History and Modern History.

In 1948, he won the School’s inaugural Thomas Thatcher Memorial Prize for the best short story. He won it again in 1949, and to this day remains the only student to have won the award twice.

Some of Malouf’s earliest creative work – including a prizewinning short story, an essay and a neat drawing – were published in the School’s literary magazine, The School Window

“When I was at school, I wanted to be a composer of music; then I wanted to be an actor. I also always wrote,” Malouf recalled.

“That short story which won the first of the Thatcher prizes, I wrote that when I was 13.”

Malouf, now 88 years old, still holds strong memories of his time at BGS and is a generous donor to the School.

The David Malouf AO Gallery, in The Lilley Centre, features a valuable collection of artworks that Malouf gifted to BGS in 2015.

Perhaps his greatest gift, though, is Johnno, a timeless tribute to the intensity of the relationships he formed all those years ago at BGS.

“I still have a very, very strong sentimental relationship to the school, because I was so grateful for the four years I had there, which were absolutely idyllic,” Malouf said.

“I couldn’t imagine a more perfect place to have spent my education, both in terms of the teachers, who were so good, and in terms of the amazing camaraderie of the boys.”

A camaraderie that helped produce Brisbane’s signature novel, and one of Australia’s finest men of Letters.