Dismissals, Public and Private

Dorothy Johnston’s first novel Tunnel Vision told a story of the lives of women on the job in a rundown Melbourne brothel. For her second book she moves to another scene of female oppression and exploitation, the domestic home. Ruth passes up the surrealist comedy of the earlier novel in favour of a closely-observed realism, which combines social satire with human pathos by setting the life of its heroine against the social and political developments of the mid 1970s. A novel with a strong sense of time and place, it moves from the township of Port Lonsdale, drenched in the sight and sound and smell of the sea, to the urban environment of 1975 Melbourne, in ferment over the precarious social reforms of the Labor government, the fall of Saigon, and that other fall, the dismissal of the Whitlam government. That Ruth herself seems unable or unwilling to make a successful transition from nature to culture establishes her as a symbol of the female predicament which Johnston explores with such care and subtlety.