All the Green Year

by Don Charlwood

  DON CHARLWOOD was born in Melbourne in 1915 and raised in Frankston, the background for his much-loved novel All the Green Year (1965), which was later made into an ABC TV series. During the Depression he walked through Victoria’s Otway forest to the Western District, where he worked as a farmhand and began writing.

  Charlwood joined the RAAF and served with Bomber Command in Britain during World War II, an experience that informed his first book, No Moon Tonight, published in 1956 and in print ever since. He then worked for thirty years in Air Traffic Control and the Department of Civil Aviation. When he retired in the mid-1970s an award for the air traffic control trainee of the year was named in his honour.

  In 1978 Charlwood delivered the memorial oration for the centenary of the wreck of the Loch Ard and published Settlers Under Sail, commissioned by the Victorian government. Marching as to War (1990) and Journeys into Night (1991), two volumes of autobiography, each won the Fellowship of Australian Writers (Vic.) Christina Stead Award. Aged ninety Charlwood published The Wreck of the Sailing Ship Netherby.

  In 1992 Don Charlwood was made a Member of the Order of Australia (AM) for services to Australian literature. He died on 18 June 2012.

  MICHAEL McGIRR, the author of The Lost Art of Sleep and Bypass: The Story of a Road, is the head of faith and mission at St Kevin’s College in Melbourne.

  ALSO BY DON CHARLWOOD

  No Moon Tonight

  An Afternoon of Time (stories)

  Take-off to Touchdown

  Wrecks and Reputations

  Settlers Under Sail

  Flight and Time (stories)

  The Long Farewell

  Marching as to War

  Journeys into Night

  The Wreck of the Sailing Ship Netherby

  textclassics.com.au

  textpublishing.com.au

  The Text Publishing Company

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  Copyright © the estate of Don Charlwood 2012

  Introduction copyright © Michael McGirr 2012

  All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright above, no part of this publication shall be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the publisher of this book.

  First published by Angus & Robertson 1965

  This edition published by The Text Publishing Company 2012

  Cover design by WH Chong

  Page design by Text

  Typeset by Midland Typesetters

  Primary print ISBN: 9781922079428

  Ebook ISBN: 9781921961724

  Author: Charlwood, D. E. (Donald Ernest), 1915-2012.

  Title: All the green year / Don Charlwood.

  Series: Text classics.

  Subjects: Teenage boys—Victoria—Fiction.

  Dewey Number: A823.3

  eBook production by Midland Typesetters, Australia

  CONTENTS

  INTRODUCTION

  Years of Many Colours

  by Michael McGirr

  All the Green Year

  AFTERWORD

  The Beginnings of All the Green Year

  by Don Charlwood

  YOU won’t travel far among Australian readers of a certain age before affectionate memories of All the Green Year begin to surface. More than that, the memories will be specific rather than vague. For two decades the novel was a regular feature of high school English, studied by people usually between the ages of thirteen and fifteen. Don Charlwood enjoyed one of the things that writers most covet: thousands of young readers, who often form deep and lasting relationships with books in a way not common in adult years. By that stage we have either read too much or read too little.

  Nevertheless, forcing books into teenagers’ hands is not always the best way to win their affections. A visitor to any op shop will find copies of Othello and King Lear treated with chastening contempt and consigned to the fifty-cent bin. Either they will be covered in graffiti (which suggests that even Shakespeare failed to interest the original owners) or they will have a few sections underlined with highlighters of different colours (which suggests that the owners were really interested in passing an exam). I once looked at a copy of Great Expectations whose cover had been altered to Great Expectorations. I won’t mention what the owner had done with the name of Dickens and I feared I could find worse inside but, unsurprisingly, the contents had never been troubled. Bibles get the same treatment.

  Before this welcome re-publication of All the Green Year, a beautiful evocation of Australian childhood first published in 1965, you might have been forced into op shops in the hope of finding it. But you will be amazed how many people, now well into middle age, have held on to their copies from long ago. Those deceptively small books, often with glued spines that tended to fall apart, will have moved with them from house to house as they got older, long after The Web of Life (the biology text of the same period) and Good News for Modern Man (the New Testament with the funky denim cover) had been donated to Vinnies or the Brotherhood.

  But each time many of the baby boomers moved house, they would have looked at All the Green Year and felt a tug on their heartstrings. For many of them, it will have been the only book they read at school that dealt with their own experience in a way they could recognise.

  It is set in 1929, which is more likely to have been the time in which their parents grew up, a world in which radio and gramophone cast the shadows that TV was to cast in their own time. The book deals largely with the experience of boys but has always been popular with female readers. It is set in Kananook—a fictionalised version of Frankston, on the south-eastern fringe of Melbourne, at a time when the area was rural. By the sixties it was urban.

  Despite this, All the Green Year is poised beautifully at that moment of adolescence when the small world of childhood suddenly becomes much bigger, with all the risk and sense of adventure that entails. It is a book with one foot in the air, hovering between innocence and its opposite, between the comfort of home and the dangerous lure of the horizon. For all this, the setting around Port Phillip Bay provides an evocative backdrop, as a place both familiar and threatening:

  Lone Pine had been named by Squid after a tree from which his father had sniped during the war…It had been planted by some forgotten settler on the highest ground of the district.

  Johnno and I began climbing without a word, putting our hands and feet in familiar places. At first the lower limbs hid the ground, but near the top the whole country opened from Point Nepean to Donna Buang…I could see the narrow gap of the Heads and the beginning of the ocean and the pale, small lighthouse at Point Lonsdale. The sun was shining on the beaches, but no sound of waves reached us and no sound from the people who were distant specks in the water there.

  Not long before this re-publication Don Charlwood died, aged ninety-six. Earlier in the year he was still an engaging and precise raconteur. He could claim a writing career spanning more than eighty years. This must be some kind of record, possibly rivalled in Australian literature only by Mary Gilmore or Rosemary Dobson. In April 2012 Charlwood published a substantial essay, ‘They prohibited the future’, for Anzac Day in his local paper, the Warrandyte Diary. It was also printed in all the Mornington Peninsula News papers, as ‘Sole Survivor Remembers’. In the essay he returned to the theme of his first book, No Moon Tonight, published in 1956, which described the experie
nce of the crews of Bomber Command in World War II, men who faced ‘nearly an inevitable fate’.

  Charlwood volunteered to join the air force in 1941, mainly because the son of the family with whom he was working on a property at Nareen in Victoria’s Western District had also volunteered. Bomber Command led to some of the most significant relationships of Charlwood’s life, not least with his wife, Nell East, whom he met and married in Canada in a case, he said with spry good humour, of love at first sight. But No Moon Tonight is alive with sadder memories. Among the grim statistics that remain with Charlwood is that twenty men enlisted alongside him; only five of them survived the war.

  The silver lining to this horror was that, in being moved to honour the memories of his comrades, Charlwood was able to fulfil a personal ambition. Ever since he was at school, he dreamed of being a writer. Poems such as Tennyson’s ‘Ulysses’ meant a great deal to him. But even more significant was Coleridge’s ‘Rime of the Ancient Mariner’. Charlwood loved the idea of being like the mariner, metaphorically grabbing the hand of an anonymous stranger and fascinating them with a tale, so much so that they couldn’t move.

  While he was working on the land in the 1930s he completed a short-story course by correspondence with the London School of Journalism and had a number of stories published, sometimes under the pseudonym E. K. Dwyer. For his twenty-first birthday he received a copy of Drinkwater’s Outline of Literature and Art, which he used to choose the books that the state library would send to Nareen. These works fed his longing to tell stories of his own.

  But, he explained, it was not until he was part of a lucky minority that survived the war that Charlwood found himself in the position of the Ancient Mariner, in possession of a story he felt compelled to share. Even after the phenomenal success of All the Green Year, a book which holds a special place in the lives of so many readers, Charlwood said that No Moon Tonight was his personal favourite. ‘Because,’ he said simply, ‘it is a book of sorrow and companionship.’

  All the Green Year followed No Moon Tonight after an interval of nine years and is a very different work. All the Green Year celebrates the invincibility of youth. The young characters have physical confidence and their story, despite its many challenges, is told with a lighter heart. There is a sense in which the book is a balm for the hurt of war. This is not to say that war is absent from it. Indeed, World War I casts a shadow in different parts of the novel: there is even a character called Birdwood Monash Peters (‘Squid’), whose dad was supposedly killed at Gallipoli. All the Green Year also deals in good measure with the theme of male friendship, and with grief and loss. But in changing the original title from Johnno’s Year (which his publisher did not like) to All the Green Year, the author surely understood the charm of his creation. The book has a wise innocence. It knows what life was like after the Great War, during the Depression, for boys in fear of bullying teachers and infatuated by pretty ones, at a time when adult life beckoned yet a livelihood was hard to come by. It also knows what it is like to be a boy with an open heart but a lot to learn.

  All the Green Year may well have its origins in Charlwood’s first published work. By 1929 young Don had moved from East Hawthorn to Frankston, where his history teacher, Mr Moody, assigned him the task of writing a history of his new town. His mother, who had grown up in Frankston, drew up a list of senior residents of the district and Charlwood set off to interview them. The resulting oral history appeared in instalments in the Frankston Standard. Charlwood was just fourteen, and was already investing his imagination in the Frankston of that era.

  More importantly, his writing career began from a discovery of the relationship between people and place. By 1965, when Don came to write All the Green Year, he and Nell had four children, including two teenage daughters. The world was full of The Beatles and the Vietnam War. One night Charlwood threatened to put his noisy girls in a book to serve them right. But, when he thought about it, he knew he couldn’t. So he turned back to another time to write a wonderful story about boys. In so doing, he made a unique contribution to the exploration of boyhood in Australian writing, a rich vein that stretches at least from Norman Lindsay’s Redheap (1930) and Saturdee (1933) to Craig Silvey’s Jasper Jones (2009).

  For all its quintessential Australianness, Don Charlwood’s voice is very much his own. It is strong, resonant, compassionate, unsentimental and yet affectionate. Thank heavens we get to hear it again.

  For my mother, born in Frankston 17th May 1886.

  Thank you for our years of growing up in the town of your youth.

  CHAPTER ONE

  The year I remember best from those days is 1929. This was the year I turned fourteen and went into the eighth grade; the year too that Grandfather McDonald became peculiar and we moved to live with him in his house on the cliffs.

  It has stayed in my memory for various reasons, but chiefly for the fiasco at its end. I feel tempted to claim that each incident played its part in leading to our final disgrace, but this would hardly be true. The matter of riding to school on Perry Brothers’ camel, for instance, had no link with later happenings at all, nor did Squid’s hypnotism, nor even, I suppose, the preservation of Eileen Johnston’s honour. These were just isolated happenings linked with nothing. Looking back at this distance of time it is difficult to recall which of them came first, though for some reason it is easy enough to remember the people and more or less what they said.

  During 1928 I had worn apple-catchers, but my main Christmas present had been a pair of long ’uns. My father said he hoped that now I was dressing as a man I would behave as a man. A forlorn hope this proved to be!

  Both at home and at school at this time we felt ourselves badly misunderstood. Looking back I realize how serious everything seemed; only in retrospect does there appear a jot of humour in the whole year.

  After five grades together this was my last year with Fred Johnston, a tall, melancholy boy of extraordinary physique, the son of a widower who ran Navy Bike Repairs in Beach Street. Though Johnno looked awkward when he tried to fit into a desk, or when he marched into school, head and shoulders above everyone else, as a swimmer and boxer hardly anyone in the town could touch him. He had learnt boxing from his father who at one time during the war had been R.A.N. welter-weight champion. Old man Johnston was a shortish ex chief petty officer with a prominent blue-polished chin and eyes like agates.

  About Johnno himself there was a contradiction I have never forgotten. He had practically no physical fear, yet he was always afraid of his father and of old Moloney. Moloney had been headmaster then for about ten years. His fear of both of them went back a long way; back, I suppose, to the third grade when Johnno had lost his mother. About a year after that Moloney, in a temper, had hit Johnno across the face with the strap. Johnno had gone home and told his father and old man Johnston had given him a note to bring to school. But the note only told Moloney to give him more for not taking his punishment like a man.

  Moloney was a little thin-lipped man of about fifty, a bachelor still. The white, bald top of his skull showed through greying hair and he wore fairly thick-lensed spectacles. He had made a butt of Johnno for as long as I could remember—for instance, when we had begun to learn carpentry he had forced Johnno to use his tools as a right-hander when he was naturally left-handed, then had ridiculed his attempts to make anything.

  In school Johnno was often afflicted by what he called “seizing up”. If Moloney stood near him during a test, he became incapable of reasoning. Or during mental arithmetic when Moloney called, “Stand by your desks. Hands on your heads,” Johnno was beaten before the question was written on the blackboard. When Moloney finally shouted “Write!” Johnno would sometimes remain with his hands fixed to his head and would move only when Moloney said, “I perceive you don’t intend co-operating today, Johnston.”

  For both of us 1929 was critical, since at the end of the year we were to sit for our Merit. We
had been assured by Moloney that without it we would not be admitted to the third form of the new school just being built on the edge of the town. The name of this imposing building could be read in bold letters above its door, KANANOOK AND DISTRICT HIGH SCHOOL.

  I should perhaps remark that in these days I was not even ordinarily adventurous or undisciplined; in fact Moloney’s report described me as “inattentive and addicted to daydreaming”. Johnno on the other hand he called “unconforming and a generally disruptive influence”, this written so savagely that the nib had punched right through the paper. My report was true, but Johnno’s was ridiculous.

  My father naïvely believed Moloney’s reports. Even when a boy called Birdwood Peters was named “most improved pupil for 1928” my father believed it and wished I would cultivate his friendship. At school no one doubted that Squid had won this prize because his mother, a widow, had been president of the Mothers’ Club for five years; indeed there were people who said that Moloney had designs on her.

  Unfortunately we were fated in 1929 to have the same Squid Peters as a neighbour; this in fact was one of a series of events that started the year badly.

  Our move next to Squid’s place came about in an odd way. It happened that in the previous year my grandmother had died, leaving my grandfather living alone in his old wooden house on the cliffs—the place in which my mother had lived as a girl. It was just before Christmas 1928 that Grandfather became peculiar.

  I should perhaps qualify this. To me Grandfather McDonald had seemed a little peculiar for as long as I could remember. He had for years called himself a Tolstoyan. I realize now that he must have been a Tols­toyan with variations of his own. For instance, although he was a vegetarian he would eat no apples because this was forbidden in the book of Genesis. A photograph of Tolstoy in the old house could almost have passed as Grandfather, with the same beard and stern, determined expression.