GAE JOHNSTON
Wedding Dress,
(1982)
(Second in a series of ‘my
favourite works’)
The Johnston
family was a taunting mix of genius and misery. George Johnston’s My Brother Jack, (1964) is known, if not
read, by very many Australians. Along with Albert Facey’s A Fortunate Life, (1981) and Helen Garner’s Monkey Grip, (1977), it offers another personal tangent, if a somewhat
melancholy one, to another iconic era of our short white Australian history, verbally
complementing the visual work of Albert Tucker in that each is ‘a daring
challenge to the cosy assumptions of national character and virtue’. These
latter are the words of one reader/writer, Paul Daley, who confesses to
re-reading Jack every ten years or so
– as a wake up to our ‘origins’, possibly as a reassurance that something of the
kind still exists, in this world of flux. His loving (not too emotive a word)
account can be read here: My Brother Jack
at 50 – the novel of a man whose whole life led up to it
Indeed the ‘Johnston world’
was not easy – but is the world of any artist (and in this case in a family of
six, including Johnston’s first child, four were ‘artists’). What did George
Johnston expect, leaving his first wife in the land of herbaceous borders and
running off with a glamorous other, in the days when this was definitely not done,
(dreamed of but not done). One might suspect that he would argue: someone had
to feed the vicarious pleasures of such a mundane world, someone had to live
the fantasy in order the spark of inspiration survive. But there would be
fallout. Johnston did not plot his life, the animal in him just took over a boy
from Elsternwick. Then he and ‘the other’, Charmian Clift, abandoned what they
described as the ‘bewildered’ world of Australia for the drama of London, and
in time gave up that smoggy capital for the tough idyll of Greece. Left behind in all
this was the gorgeous daughter of Johnston’s first marriage, GAE, her name
derived from her parents initials, G-A-E (George
And Elsie) Johnston.
Sadly GAE JOHNSTON is no
longer with us but her spirit lives on, for this writer, in a substantial drawing (above) admired for nearly 40 years. I first saw this work leaning over to the left of
our conversation when I went to speak with Gae about her mother, stepmother and
father, back in the early 1980s – I was writing about Australian artist couples.
The drawing kept drawing my attention. When we stopped talking about parents I
asked Gae about it.
The subject is a dress
hanging over a chair. The dress is a ‘significant’ type, not a shift, but
perhaps something ceremonial. Further afield among leaning works there was a similarly
dimensioned, what might be called ‘negative’ of the same subject. Where the
drawing that immediately caught my attention was dark, the other was light, in
the same way that a black and white photographic negative, which ultimately
produces a darker image is lighter. Gae was exploring the positive and negative
with significant reason in this context.
If my memory is correct Gae
was then living in Eltham, or nearby. I recall the room in which we talked as
rather sombre, with internal stone walls, similar in style to a lot of
buildings in the area inspired by Monsalvat.
Gae and I moved in the same circles, to an extent, so I knew her from other
occasions too. Gae was a very beautiful woman, small, natural blonde, gentle in
manner but ferocious in her visual ability, a significant draughtswoman. The
strength of her work and her physical demeanour seem strangely mismatched.
The story Gae told of the
dramatic drawing that leaned into my consciousness was this: it was indeed a
significant dress, a wedding dress, lying over the back of a chair. The dress
belonged to her half-sister Shane, the second child of George Johnston and
Charmian Clift’s union. Nadia Wheatley, in her biography of writer Charmian
Clift, (The Life and Myth of Charmian
Clift, 2001) reports Clift retrospectively musing, (in a Hazel de Berg
interview, 8.6.65), of the time of her second pregnancy with Johnston, so soon
after the birth of their first son Martin, who was then seven months old:
‘At this point I should have taken wings and
started to fly, but at this point also, of course, I was involved in having
children, and for many years I had this dual thing, the frustrations that are
inevitable with any creative person being tied and bound and at the same time
struggling, beating one’s head against a wall to do what one wants to do. I
think those are terribly difficult years for any young woman and for a young
woman who wants to write or paint or anything else, even more so.’ (Wheatley,
218)
Clift and Johnston had just
shared the 1948 Sydney Morning Herald
Prize for their collaborative novel, High
Valley. It is impossible not to
wonder how much of such thinking found its way into the psyche of her gestating
child.
George Johnston on Hydra
Shane wore the dress in the
drawing on at least two significant occasions: her wedding, and her death. She
put it on before she committed suicide in 1974. Her mother, aged 45, had died
of a barbiturate overdose in 1969 and her death seemed to open the floodgate of
family tragedy. George died in 1971, Gae died of an overdose in 1988 and poet
Martin Johnston, the eldest Johnston-Clift child, died of alcoholism in 1990.
Yet they leave behind them very significant achievements, one of which in my
care I wish to share.*
I have asked various
contemporaries and mutual friends what they can recall of the Gae of some
thirty years ago, at least one said her work still influences his.
*Because of the nature of what
I was writing, I asked Gae if I could buy another work which is reproduced
below.
Gae Johnston (signed but untitled) 1978
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