Johnno was published by the University of Queensland Press in 1975. The novel is Malouf’s first and most directly autobiographical work: the narrator, Dante, grows up in wartime and postwar Brisbane — a subtropical city that feels to its inhabitants like the end of the earth, beautiful but culturally suffocating.
Dante’s friendship with Johnno — a wild, charismatic, self-destructive young man who drinks too much, takes too many risks, and refuses to accept the limitations that Brisbane imposes — is the novel’s central relationship. Johnno represents everything Dante desires but fears: freedom, recklessness, the willingness to be destroyed rather than diminished. Dante is the observer, the recorder, the survivor; Johnno is the one who lives.
The novel traces their parallel paths from school in Brisbane through Dante’s departure for Europe (where he encounters the wider world that Brisbane denied him) and Johnno’s increasingly erratic behavior. Their friendship is interrupted by years of separation, then resumed with the intensity that old friendships carry — the weight of shared youth, shared boredom, shared desire to be somewhere else.
Brisbane itself is almost a character: its wet heat, its wooden houses, its flooding river, its provincial confidence and provincial limitations are rendered with the precision of someone who knows the place intimately and has complicated feelings about it. Malouf neither sentimentalizes nor demonizes the city — he presents it as the specific, real place that shaped him.
Collecting Johnno
First edition (University of Queensland Press, St Lucia, 1975): Cloth binding, dust jacket.
Market values:
- First edition, fine/fine: $100–$300
- Very good/very good: $40–$100