Clean Straw for Nothing

Clean Straw for Nothing (1969) is a Miles Franklin Award-winning novel[1] by Australian author George Johnston. This novel is a sequel to My Brother Jack, and is the second in the Meredith trilogy of semi-autobiographical novels by Johnston.[2]

Clean Straw for Nothing
First edition
AuthorGeorge Johnston
CountryAustralia
LanguageEnglish
SeriesMeredith trilogy
PublisherCollins, Australia
Publication date
1969
Media typePrint (Hardback & Paperback)
Pages318pp
Preceded byThe Far Face of the Moon 
Followed byA Cartload of Clay 

Story outline

In real life, Johnson abandoned a conventional career in Australia in journalism, and moved to a Greek island which was a magnet at the time for artists and writers. The novel Clean Straw for Nothing similarly tells the story of a journalist (David Meredith) who relocates to a Greek island, but fails to find the answers he seeks after even 13 years.

Meredith's relationship with his second wife, Cressida, closely parallels Johnston's second marriage to Charmian Clift. On the eve of Clean Straw for Nothing's publication, Clift overdosed on barbiatuates in Sydney. In a posthumously-published essay, My Husband George, Clift wrote: "I do believe that novelists must be free to write what they like, in any way they liked to write it (and after all who but myself had urged and nagged him into it?), but the stuff of which Clean Straw for Nothing is made is largely experience in which I, too, have shared and ... have felt differently because I am a different person..."[3]

Critical reception

Ian Hicks, writing in The Canberra Times at time of the original publication of the novel, indicates that it is a worthy successor to My Brother Jack: "To say that it repeats the success of Jack is to be guilty of extreme understatement; it is a magnetic book that grasps the reader's attention and holds it firmly, with no apology...As of now we have two fine novels setting before us the dilemma of the Australian search for something beyond and intrinsically better than a crushing rush for materialistic gain. What can have happened, we are being asked, to the soul of a country once so much identified by its demand for social advance and by its belief in the virtue that was mateship."[4]

gollark: There was actually one AI research organisation recently which made a language model try to capture human common sense ethics.
gollark: You train a neural network on samples of good things, and it outputs new good things for you to do.
gollark: That, and also by many metrics things are generally improving.
gollark: That doesn't really work at scale or for resource allocation decisions.
gollark: Probably because they're impossible to empirically test and tied up with politics.

See also

Notes

The novel takes it title from the old London pub lines: "Drunk for a penny. Dead drunk for tuppence. Clean straw for nothing."[4]

Kay Keavney interviewed the author for The Australian Women's Weekly at the time of its publication.[5]

References
  1. "Author Wins $1,0000 Award", The Canberra Times, 15 April 1970, p3
  2. Austlit - Clean Straw for Nothing by George Johnston
  3. McCooey, Dave (1996). Artful Histories: Modern Australian Autobiography, pp 167–168, 216.
  4. "Continuing the quest for an Australian identity" by Ian Hicks, The Canberra Times, 23 August 1969, p23
  5. "From George, with sadness" by Kay Keavney, The Australian Women's Weekly, 27 August 1969, p. 13.
Awards and achievements
Preceded by
Three Cheers for the Paraclete		 Miles Franklin Award recipient
1969		 Succeeded by
A Horse of Air


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