George Johnston’s faintly disguised autobiography about a boy growing up amid the dull sprawl of interwar Melbourne and men damaged by the first world war has become a classic Australian novel, but at the time it was a daring challenge to cosy assumptions of national character and virtue

It’s been 50 years since Collins first published George Johnston’s My Brother Jack in Australia and Britain. Fifty! That is the age at which Johnston – well known to Australians as a journalist before exiling himself to Europe in 1951– began writing what still deserves recognition as a seminal novel for his country. A 50-year-old writer is probably too old to be called prodigious, although Johnston’s output as both a journalist and later, a novelist, were the envy of contemporaries.

Released to national and international acclaim in 1964, My Brother Jack was the novel of a man whose whole life had led to it. It was also the work of a man who, though only 52 when it hit the bookshops, was almost physically and emotionally shot, a man who, had his body held out, might have lived into his 80s to produce half a dozen more novels to which the epithet “great Australian” could just as easily have been applied.

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