prevalence+of+violence+and+brutality+in+Australian+life+in+the+1920s

= //My Brother Jack// claims a high prevalence of violence and brutality in Australian life in the 1920s. How is this depicted? =

The boys witness and experience violence at a young age. Monthly beatings given out by their father are prime examples of the violence and brutality the the boys were victim to. This household violence extended beyond the boys beatings but also violence between Davey's parents and to an extent, between the two boys.

George Johnston writes very descriptively and vividely about the beatings, this may indicate that they had an extreme psychological effect on their life later on, 'This went on for several years, and God knows what damage it did to me psychologically.'

Violence is depicted through the war and the effects of having injured and disabled soldiers living within their family home. It shows the boys from a their earliest memory that life is not always happy. It opens them to a range of life experiences that otherwise (if their parents were not a nurse and returned veteran) they would not have felt firsthand the results and emotional turmoil that comes from war. It is also depicted through the visual imagery that Johnston uses that constantly refer to dark and unpleasant colours which in turn reflect feelings. During their early days Davy and Jack were brought up in a household that was constantly changing. Their mother being a nurse and father being the war-hero of the house, we witness the brutality of war first hand. //"Jack and// //I must have spent a good part of our boyhood in the fixed belief that grown-up men who were complete were pretty rare beings//..." [page 2]. This quote describes what they think being an adult is. This shows how the war affected not only the boys but their whole family.

Images in the book that are simple things are being depicted as violent and horrific. This is evident when Johnston is describing an event that happened early in his childhood, there a ship and rust has started to set in on the ship's side, Davy sees this as blood that has been spilt over the ship as a result of some type of massacare. This is caused by the continual drop in visits by wounded and dispathched soldiers staying at their house as well as the stories that are being told by them. Davy is exposed to many deaths and war is a continual subject in the house, as it was in society following World War One.

Jack always talked about wanting to kill his dad for the beatings given to his mother, and took up boxing, which was popular in the 1920s and encouraged as a sport in schools, as a way of one day being able to asert control and also being able to do something to help the situation, instead of sitting back as Davy does. The other reference to the violence and brutality of the time is the Police Strike, where Big Jack and Bert become patrolers and are involved ina fight with streeet gangs and Bert recieves a blow to the head with a metal bar. Street gangs are referenced frequently throughout the book, fighting outside the family home but also Jack's intolerance for them, probably because of his intolerance for his father's violent ways.

Jack is the more confident one as that he does not back down from violence and fights to defend his rights and belifs. He takes the violence head on, its because he does not understand the violence but he accepts it, and tries to deal with it to make it stop. David on the other hand takes it and refuses to deal with it.

For Davy it seems that violence seeks him out where ever he chooses to hide no matter how deep the hole he crawls into like the violence between his mother and father, or the boxing training with his brother, or even the rape and murder of Sam's long time girl friend Jessica. As always with violence there either comes exhilaration or fear, for Jack it seemed to exhilarate him where with Davy the fear had worked his way through to his very core turning his skin yellow and removing his back bone.[Um, need a quote for this!]

Davy has grown up in a society were violence is a common day- almost acceptable thing. The monthly beatings that Jack snr. inflicts on the boys cause tension between Jack jnr- but Davy doesn't even lift a hand in protest. Murder is rife in Melbourne and yet when Jessica is murdered the people of Melbourne label her as "easy" and bohemian.

There are many ways in which the violence and brutality is depicted in 'My Brother Jack', such as 'confession' at the end of each month, where they are beaten to the point of unconsciousness. The gangs in the suburb the boys live in also depicts the violence.