John Morrison (1904-1998), short story writer, novelist and essayist, resided for a time in Mt Evelyn and was part of our local tradition of radicalism.
Born in Sunderland in the north of England, John Gordon Morrison left school at 14 and worked for two years in a local museum, before serving a gardening apprenticeship. He came to Australia in 1923 as an assisted immigrant. He worked his way through country districts of Queensland, New South Wales and Victoria, including the Dandenongs. Returning to England in 1927 because of a brother’s illness, he found himself homesick for Australia, and worked his passage back as a ship’s steward in 1928. On the voyage he met his future wife, an Irish-born maid, Frances Rosina Jones.
Morrison had a varied working life as a farm labourer, station hand, wool presser, wharf-labourer, process worker and jobbing gardener. He was fortunate to be in work throughout the Depression, but was inspired as a social realist writer by the hardships he witnessed. This social and political awakening also led him to join the Communist Party of Australia (CPA). Morrison’s friends included the writers and fellow communists Alan Marshall, Frank Hardy, Judah Waten and Dorothy Hewett, and artist Vic O’Connor, who had lived in Mt Evelyn as a boy.
Success came in 1945, when Morrison won the Fellowship of Australian Writers Short Story Competition. In 1947 he received a grant from the Australian Literary Fund, which enabled him to leave work to complete a novel, The Creeping City, published in 1949. The setting is ‘Mabooda’, a fictionalised Monbulk of the 1920s, when the berry farms were being sold off for holiday homes and guest houses. His second novel, Port of Call, is set partly in the Dandenongs, and his story ‘All I Ask’ in an Olinda guesthouse.
In the early 1950s he moved to Silvan Road (Monbulk Road) Mt Evelyn. I could not find any stories with Mt Evelyn backgrounds, but his most famous story, ‘Dog Box’, is set on the Lilydale train.
Morrison left Mt Evelyn after his wife’s death in 1967. In 1969 he married Russian-born Rachela Anders (Amdurski) who, he claimed proudly, could read his translated works in five languages. Morrison had retired from work by this time. Without the inspiration provided by his job and daily commute, he wrote little in his final years. He died in 1998, aged 94.
The Creeping City, serialised in the Free Press October-November 1947, also ‘All I Ask’ and several other stories, are available online on Trove.
