Theme: the Great Outdoors.

My Grandfather Alex Johnston was a journalist and artist. Born in Tasmania in 1868, as a young man he took off for the wilds of Western Australia, but not before he had explored the scenery around his hometown, as evidenced by some early paintings. Subsequent paintings in a series of sketchbooks have enabled me to trace his wanderings.

He also loved the sea, and on arrival in Western Australia must have spent some time around the waterfront at Fremantle (Oct-Nov 1894) before starting as a journalist at the ‘Coolgardie Miner’ in the tiny little goldfields town where he obviously enjoyed wandering around and painted many sunset scenes.

After a few years he was off to the fabled East via a steamer which called in at Manilla in 1899 and then Celebes, Hong Kong and Shanghai (June-Nov 1899). Returning home via Aden and Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) in March 1900 he returned to the goldfields until the end of 1900; then was off again to the East (Sumatra, Penang, Yenoshima, Kyoto in 1904 and back with a stop off in New Guinea (July 1904). He seldom painted people apart from the Japanese and then mostly in crowd scenes.

While working as a journalist back home in Melbourne, he met and married Bertha Wade in 1908 and they spent the next few years wandering around northern NSW and southern Queensland before settling down in Sydney where their first-born arrived in 1912 when Alex was 42.

They bought a lovely old house in leafy Tambourine Bay, Sydney, where they lived the rest of their lives.

Alex continued work as a journalist while also painting around the neighbourhood, particularly the jacaranda trees, at every opportunity. For a time he owned a sailing boat. He was interested in all aspects of nature and could identify the call of every bird in the garden, according to my father. He encouraged me to take an interest in nature, and in reading in general, lending me one volume of the Encyclopaedia Britannica at a time to take home.

My parents were not much into the Great Outdoors and never took the family camping but I seem to have inherited Granddad’s interests. I wish he had lived long enough to see me graduate with a degree in Zoology, and to know I am now living in the most beautiful great outdoors country of all, New Zealand. He would be so interested in the many modern nnovations that have taken place since his time – supersonic jets, digital cameras, computers, the world wide web – he would have embraced them all.