Melbourne+suburban+landscape

=George Johnston is at great pains to portray the Melbourne suburban landscape as deadeningly conformist to the point of utter hypocrisy. Describe the various aspects this conformism takes.= Everything about the Melbourne suburbs it dull and very similar; picket fences out the front, mowed grass, tin rooves. Even the people living in these dull and boring homes are vastly similar to one another; the women all are down trodden house wives, the men all gruff hard working men that have a bleak out look on the younger generation and their nightly rituals.

Especially during the Depression people had the mentality to keep their head down and to just live day to day. There was of course the bohemian scene, but most people simply wanted to conform with the crowd or had no choice in the matter such as the the sustinence workers, who all wore a "uniform" of the dyed black army coats. Johnston portrays the miserable "greyness" of surburbia with repeated themes such as the houses, fences and the culture of the people of the time.

When reminiscing back to his childhood and describing his home town, George Johnston uses dark, dull, depressing adjectives. We can assume this was due to the fact that his childhood memories are not pleasant ones, and remembering for him can be painful. This is shown through such descriptions as 'flat and dreary suburb far away in Melbourne, Australia'. In this single sentance, Johnston tells us of his vision of the suburb he lived in with 'flat and dreary', and his emotional detachment with the words 'far away in Melbourne'. When writing these words, it may not only mean that is far away from his current location, but it was a long time ago, a time he doesn't wish to remember. [Use this paragraph as an example of how to focus your answer on the text. By pointing out the use of adjectives and specifying the part of the text that provides a particular image or emotion helps the assessr to see that you have understood the text and that you are making connections with it. Well done.] Johnston's writing makes us picture his childhood images and upbringing surroundings as a dull and bad place to live. He portrays the image that he doesn't enjoy where he grew up and that as a child he never really fitted in with his family and suburb. He was never going to be a sterotypical boy that fitted into those surroundings, and grow up to be a normal working class man. Unlike Jack he was always destined to move up in class and live a different life to his neighbours and fellow school students. Jack seemed to not mind the surroundings that he lived in unlike Davy who felt that is was wrong with all the violence that happened in the community.

Davy is scared of his chilhood. When he is talking about his past and where he was situated he describes it with dull and dark colours as well as bland and uninteresting words to show that these are not happy memories and that he would have rathered a different life. [Use examples to support your comments].

Even during the depression, the landscape in terms of physical appearance, doesn't change. The surburbia's aesthetics do not change, and even though there are so many unemployed, the streets around the Meredith's house do not portray this. The Meredith house is the one constant throughout the novel, in that even when they leave (Davy and Jack), they still return to the same household, which is used as a lodgings for so many people making it a transitional point, as so many pass through it.

The atmosphere of the city of Melbourne is portrayed as a very impoverished place with dull and dreary images being constructed by the author.

He made out Melbourne to be hit by the depression pretty bad with slums and shacks on board walks and a sky as grey as wolves "which to the despair of the municipal traffic people butted right in among the city tram lines and the stamping dray-horses and the confusion of the Spencer Street railway viaduct." pg68 chapter5.