Put this one on your must read Classics list.
This book is really a memoir of the author (David Meredith) who just happens to admire his older brother Jack as he is the total opposite of himself. It takes place in Melbourne Australia between the 2 wars. It starts with his parents returning from the 1st World War, when the 2 boys are very young. It gives us a fantastic insight into the impact the War had on peoples lives and how they dealt with it, and how Australian society developed from it, through the roaring twenties and the Depression and into the 2nd World War. Jack is the quintiseential Aussie like his parents and their cohorts while David is quiet, reserved and out of place in that working-class suburban Melbourne world. Yet it is David that grows up to fill a space in society far greater than most people can imagine for themselves while Jack, the lively one, the adaptable one, the one in tune with his environment, never grows out of that environment.

The greatness of this book is its sheer honesty, and the honesty of the author. It portrays an Australian society that is violent, racist and sexist to levels that are embarrassing to admit today. It shows how characters react to what is happening around them and from these pieces build their lives. In this environment characters can be both kind and caring and at the same time rough and self-centred. Jack seems to blend all these elements into a rather balanced personality, but David admits early in the book, he is not a nice person - by the end of the book you have to agree with him.

My Brother Jack is the first of a trilogy which basically is a memoir of the author's life. The other books are Clean Straw for Nothing, and, A Cartload of Clay. ( )

I've just re-read this book 50 years after studying it at school. Interestingly, the book remains compelling and has stood the test of time.
It is a harsh and raw self examination of the writers life. While many details are known to be factually inaccurate, the whole gives an impression of what life was like in Melbourne after WW1, and how Johnston lived his life. No picnic, it is still a great piece of writing. ( )

Interesting. I'm glad I've read it, but I certainly have no desire to keep a copy on my shelves and re-read it later. Almost always described as an Australian Classic - it is unambiguously Australian, but I'm not sure what makes it a "classic"? I don't know enough literary history to place it in the context of other Australian books, but I'm guessing that it was among the earlier books to be unashamedly about the real lives of people who identify themselves as "Australian", and I suppose it was our involvement in the World Wars which was so important in shaping that identity. As such, I found it worthwhile to look back on what sort of society my parents and grandparents grew up in and how that might have made them into the people they were, and hence made me. My own personal family history is strongly linked to characters from this period and so it's good to get a different view on that part of our history. I found myself identifying quite closely with the narrator David, but the character of his brother Jack remains a complete mystery to me. I think maybe that's the point of the story?....to challenge the "Jack"s in our society?? Hmmmm...I think I'm out of my depth here, not being the analytical, intellectual type. ( )

The first book in a great trilogy and one which I really enjoyed...loved the TV series too. I think the others in the series were Clean Straw for Nothing and a Cartload of Hay.
Third in my list of ten favourite Australian books. ( )

The story begins at the closing of World War I and ends at the culmination of World War II. The years in between furnish the backdrop against which two Australian working-class brothers grow into adolescence, young manhood, and the early years of maturity that are marked by marriage, children, and ageing parents. Though masterfully drawn as authentic Australian characters in an authentic Australian landscape, Dave, Jack, their parents, and their wives are true to archetypes that exist in every human culture.
After a childhood of games, fights, and mischief, Jack wholeheartedly romps through his hormonally driven skirt-chasing phase, then leaps into adulthood, brashly taking on the mantle of manhood, which means patriotic service to his country, responsibility to his family, and creation of the next generation of human beings. Jack is Everyman.
Dave occupies a sort of middle-management fringe that nature can afford because Jack is tending his never-ending job so well. Dave is pushed from behind by civilization's need for progress and pulled forward by Jack, who needs him to be better than he is. Each of them is driven by eternal forces, Jack the man of action and Dave the man whose decisions are almost always non-decisions that move him inexorably forward without feeling responsibility for where he's been or where he's going.
The tale is told in the first person by Dave, with such incredible self-scrutiny and painful insight into the foibles and weaknesses of a clever, gifted writer that the reader feels compelled to accept it as a true autobiography. But it most likely isn't, at least not in its entirety. The gift of a novel is that the writer can tell the entire, bald truth and hide behind the fiction of it. A secondary benefit that feeds the novelist's creative soul is that events can be changed that didn't turn out right in real life or maybe seemed too mundane to be worthy of printed expression. Life is stranger than fiction, and fiction is more honest.
Johnston is a superb writer, and My Brother Jack is on my Top Ten List of Things That Make Me Glad I Trekked to Australia—right up there with the magpie's morning song, the stark white bark of giant gum trees, fine red-orange sand, the haunting sound of the didjeridoo, and the aura of people who have been here so long that they are inseparable from the earth.
On the back cover of my fragile, yellowing 1971 paperback copy is an excerpt from a review published in the London Illustrated News in which the reviewer concludes, "I truly believe this to be one of the greatest books written this century." Well said. ( )