reviewed by Victor Violante

‘Acclaimed Canberra crime fiction writer Dorothy Johnston is quick to point out that her latest book’s cover – featuring a man pulling on stockings – and plot about a cross-dressing politician, is not based on Alexander Downer. Or any other politician, for that matter, she said at the launch of her new crime novel Eden.

    Sure, the federal Foreign Affairs Minister once donned fishnet stockings as a stunt, but Johnston said the victim in her latest work was fictitious. And in any case her victim was an independent candidate in ACT politics…

reviewed by Graeme Blundell

A politician is found dead in a Canberra brothel in a flowered silk dress and blonde wig. Security consultant Mahoney is pulled into the investigation when a lobby group campaigning against internet censorship legislation asks her to check a company producing cyberspace-blocking technologies.

‘There are a lot of things that appeal about EDEN. The central character is female, slightly flawed - but not annoyingly so, persistent, capable and conflicted. Her family life is so consistent with that hybrid type of family that's common these days, she's happy with Ivan and annoyed by Ivan and ever so slightly attracted to a local cop.

The sub-cast of characters - the brothel owner Margot, the prostitute Denise who was with him when he died play a major part in building up the story of the book, as do some of the lesser profiled characters - such as Carmichael's political rival but close friend Ken Dollimore. The plot's nicely complicated, providing a real balance for the idea that there is no suspicious death at the beginning of this story.’

"It's interesting," Dorothy Johnston muses, "to live in a place that so many people hate".
Recently returned from an Australia Council sponsored residency at New York's
renowned Ledig House, Johnston notes that in spending time out of Canberra "you're immediately struck by the antipathy that the rest of the country can feel towards the city. You don't recognise it yourself as the city you inhabit."

It's the lived experience of Canberra, rather than the clichés which derive from it being the national capital and, in many people's perceptions, synonymous with the Federal Government, that Johnston explores in her latest novel, The House at Number 10. "My project in living and writing here, and being imaginatively affected by Canberra, is to do with the substance . . . that lived-life aspect of it," she says.

Johnston - who has lived in Canberra since 1979 - cites other writers working in a similar vein, most notably Marion Halligan, and the "long and quite rich tradition of poets living and working here." Yet, she also recognises that perceptions of Canberra as a bland and soulless city are difficult to shift. "People still think that it's a contradiction in terms that one could . . . express the place fully imaginatively, that somehow your imagination will wither and die if it was to live here, and I suppose I write against that notion."

Twice short-listed for the Miles Franklin award for her literary fiction, it was her debut crime novel, The Trojan Dog, and its sequel, The White Tower, which first saw Johnston use Canberra as a setting for her novels. An idea for a third crime story, set in a Canberra brothel, eventually distilled into The House at Number 10. "I realised that if I wanted to write a novel which was set in a brothel and make it contemporary in some way, and at the same time say the things I wanted to say, I couldn't do it with a crime novel and the characters I had," she recalls. "I had to start afresh and invent completely new characters for the story that I was now beginning to feel I wanted to tell."

Johnston, who herself worked in a Melbourne massage parlour for  about a year during the 1970s - a period she describes as "ancient history" - has written several stories and essays dealing with the topic of prostitution, and it was the re-discovery of a previously unpublished story about a female architect "who designs renovations for a brothel" that gave her the "seed" for The House at Number 10. From there, the actual writing of the novel "just flew". "I wrote the first draft in about ten weeks," Johnston remembers, "which is extraordinary for me. I'll never have this experience again, I'll never expect to, and I've never had it before, but the novel was there, I really felt it was in my head, it had been in my head for decades, in one form or another, and it just spilled out."

One of the few characters who survives from the early short story is the architect, and the theme of the built environment, particularly the dynamic that is established between people and their workplaces, is central to Johnston's novel. "I don't think you can write about Canberra without writing about architecture," Johnston says. "Because Canberra is the dream of an architect."

The story of Sophie, a young woman abandoned by her husband who begins working as a prostitute in order to support herself and her daughter, The House at Number 10 is more than just an elaboration of the day-to-day activities of a brothel and the economic freedom a woman may garner through her work there. Rather, it examines "the way the women in the brothel inhabit the space in which they work and what they do with it." The brothel becomes, for Sophie at least, "a kind of fairytale place" because it's a space where time is, in essence, suspended.

In an earlier essay, Johnston remarked on the ordinariness of the suburban house in which she herself used to work, and how the house reminded her "of a house I lived in as a small child". This is one of many contradictions inherent in the business of prostitution which Johnston plays with in The House at Number 10.

That the brothel is "set up in a suburban house, 'hidden' from the public, yet in its own way a public building, is a peculiar, and at the same time peculiarly apt metaphor for anxieties about where the private ends and the public takes over," Johnston notes. "The relationships that form inside a brothel are at the same time of the most personal and intimate kind, and yet public in their own way too, because they are developed and conducted within the framework of an overtly commercial exchange."

According to Johnston, the brothel is "a unique form of suburban clandestine theatre. . . It's a very theatrical life, and I'm fascinated by that. I've always been attracted to the play within the play." There is inherent in prostitution an artifice which, Johnston recognises, Canberra itself shares, both the city and the industry being "full of anomalies".

"The city's visually a kind of monochrome, or very geometric," she notes, "but in some ways I look at it like domestic life. It's bland on the surface, but seething underneath. And Lake Burley Griffin, what's it got under it? A farmhouse and a racetrack buried - . To me, those kind of concepts are very interesting metaphorically."

What results is not merely a story about prostitution, but a novel where the city itself becomes a central character, a "sort of meditation on how people live in a city and how they make it a human place.”

"Imagining Canberra," Johnston notes, "is a project that hasn't been undertaken by that many writers." The House at Number 10, along with the work of Halligan and Dowse, and Johnston's own crime novels, are important steps in redressing that imbalance. "I think that's what we need, so that you can no longer dismiss Canberra, and the clichés are a little bit harder to get away with," Johnston emphasises. "We need all kinds of people to imagine Canberra, in all kinds of ways."

It's a project that Dorothy Johnston intends to go on pursuing.

(crime section)

The Trojan Dog is a thriller that deals in emotions and ideas while offering the reader a pacy, political plot. Sandra Mahoney is a low-level public servant, caught in a spin of loyalty and paranoia sliced and diced as only Canberra can. Mahoney has returned to work in the last weeks of a federal Labor government when aloof boss Rae Evans is implicated in computer hacking and disappearing grant dollars. Mahoney supports the widely disliked Evans and artfully draws together the evidence. The novel as a whole works in a similar way. The Trojan Dog is a subtle absorbing piece about an ordinary woman who is deeply affected by what she uncovers in others and herself. Johnston is an exceptionally good writer.

reviewed by Bob Hefner

Johnston's foray into crime a page-turner

I'd intended to have just a peek at the proof pages of Dorothy Johnston's new novel, The Trojan Dog, when they arrived last week. Trouble was, once I started reading I couldn't put them down.

The Trojan Dog is Dorothy Johnston's first foray into literary crime fiction. It is, as they say, a page-turner.

Set in Canberra in the months leading up to the federal election of 1996 which saw the Coalition returned to power, the story is told by Sandra Mahoney, a "wife on pause" who is on a short-term contract with the Department of Industrial Relations, which "squatted on top of a travel centre like a frog on a lily pad".

Sandra's curiosity leads her into the role of amateur detective when it's discovered that someone has added another zero to a $100,000 payment made by the department to a shady computer firm.

Despite her worries over her own future job security, the impending election, her crumbling marriage (her husband is overseas), and her young son's problem with reading, she can't shake the feeling that the prime suspect in the computer fraud, an unpopular senior bureaucrat, is innocent.

She soon becomes caught up in the machinations of unscrupulous hackers who are more than willing to commit crimes in the real world to cover up for the ones they've perpetrated in cyberspace.

Johnston has got Mahoney's voice just right in this novel. She's a character whose fate we care about.

Canberra itself is another star attraction in the novel, from the hustle-and-bustle around the Jolimont Centre to the quieter and more protective environment of Tilleys, where Sandra meets with her old University of Melbourne friend Gail Trembath, now a Canberra Times reporter also in the trail of the crime.

It's all good fun and thought-provoking too, and it kept me guessing who done it until the end. In the meantime I enjoyed letting myself be carried away by Johnston's prose, which is bright and feisty and distinguished by observations such as this:

"Some people lose too young what they love best, while others anticipate, with every breath, the loss that has not yet crippled them, so that in the end they cannot tell the difference between being given something and having it taken away."
The Trojan Dog is Johnston's second novel with Adelaide publisher Wakefield Press. Her first, One For The Master, was short-listed for the Miles Franklin Award in 1998.

This one, in my opinion, is even better. And better still, it's only the first of a planned trilogy.

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Writing in MBR Bookwatch, Harriet Klausner noted that the book "is a terrific Australian amateur sleuth starring a delightful protagonist, a fabulous support cast who makes the office seem real, and a fantastic look at Canberra."
A Publishers Weekly contributor commented that "Johnston's literary, character-driven crime debut explores white-collar corruption as well as a modern woman's personal transformation."

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reviewed by Ivor Indyk

Dorothy Johnston's One For The Master is that rare thing, a contemporary Australian novel which draws strength and resonance from one of the oldest novelistic traditions in Australian literature.

Up until the 1950s it was "the" Australian novel tradition, social in orientation, focused on the working lives of ordinary people, realist in presentation. Caricatured by Patrick White as "the dun-coloured offspring of journalistic realism", a label that still attaches to it in public consciousness, the tradition was neither dun-coloured nor journalistic. On the contrary, in the best novelists, particularly the women - Prichard, Dark, Tennant, Langley, Cusack, Hewett - it had colour and reach and energy and commitments: qualities you wouldn't want to lose on any account.

One For The Master is set around the life of a factory, in this case a Geelong woollen mill, over a period which begins in 1950 and ends in 1996 amid the mill's ruins on the banks of the Barwon River. The story is told from the point of view of a woman, Helen Sullivan, whose own life has been determined by her relation to the mill. Johnston's use of the first person - a technique almost ubiquitous among novel writers these days - is what gives the novel its contemporary feel.

The combination is very effective. The young woman's individual sensibility colours the novel's social and political perspectives, while they, in turn, have an added immediacy for being registered through her consciousness. The great "scenes" of the realist novel are typically those which feature landmarks in the experience of the collective - the wedding, the funeral, the flood, the strike or protest meeting, the picnic races, the rituals of labour. By presenting these scenes through Helen Sullivan's eyes, Johnston gives them new life and relevance, measuring their collective import against a feminine subjectivity which is very much of the '90s.

The contemporary novel has an uneasy relationship to politics, partly because it is so intensely personal, partly also, no doubt, because it doesn't want to upset the market. One For The Master shows no such queasiness, casting its heroine as a witness to, and in small ways a participant in, the changing economic circumstances of the woollen mill, the agitation around Menzies' referendum to ban the Communist Party, the struggle with the DLP within the union movement, and the larger tensions between Catholicism and Protestantism which have been so formative in Australian culture.

Most personally felt, of course, are the working conditions within the mill, particularly the danger posed by the looms and blending machines, which can maim or dismember, or catching on hair or clothing, pull their human attendants to a gruesome death. Having lost her closest relative, Uncle Len, this way, Helen follows a path similar to that trodden by earlier heroines in the tradition, towards political awareness and action. Only now there is no assurance that history is on the workers' side. There are small victories, but the mill, the economy which gives it life, are failing, inexorably. As is the way with realist novels, the river that flows past the mill offers itself to allegorical interpretation. Helen sees it not as a current leading ever onwards, but as the bearer of a ghostly mist and as a huge, inhuman silver muscle.

The chill of the 1950s is all about us at the moment, so One For The Master is particularly timely for the insight it offers into the way the narrowing of social horizons may be resisted with personal acts of decency and integrity. It was the realist tradition which registered the significance of immigration to Australian culture in the years before and after World War 11, and Johnston is again both contemporary and traditional in her quiet insistence that it is in this kind of mixed society that people's allegiances and family ties are to be forged. Helen's father, who she barely remembers, was German; her stepfather is Italian; her best friend Helinka Polish. There is little strain and much attraction - the established difference between Catholic and Protestant is more keenly felt than racial difference.

For whatever their backgrounds, the characters share a common experience. Helen's father abandoned the family when she was a child. Her husband Wall's father was killed in an accident in the mill when he was a child. Helinka left three brothers dead in Poland and her mother and father are "walking dead". The few people in the novel who have some connection with the past, like Uncle Len and Queenie and Miss Foot, are clung to with eagerness.

There is a sense of lightness and insubstantiality in the characters, and a kind of helplessness before history, which springs directly from their having only a tenuous or broken link with the past. When Helen attends her uncle's funeral, the faces of the mourners make her think of "a small blue flower putting down roots in a fingernail of soil". As the mill sinks into insolvency, she dedicates herself to perfecting a cloth made of rabbit fur and wool that might somehow restore its fortunes. The dedication is worthy, the effort doomed from the start.

Against this social shallowness, this nearness of vision, Johnston advances the virtue of personal loyalty. "I was slow to form attachments but once they were made I could not break them", Helen declares. "And if this stopped me from seeing clearly and courageously into the future, seeing what needed to be done, then it was a fault that I would have to live with". This is a very modest credo when compared with those offered by earlier novelists in the tradition - a '90s perspective, without ideology, without the consolation offered by large identifications like class solidarity or national destiny, but with a keen sense of human decency, and of obligation. One For The Master is a quiet novel, courageous in its modesty, and in its own loyalty to the past.

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