JUNE 1 2019 LISTENER 31
this Me Too movement. I think if you read
some history, you would actually see we’ve
come a long way. You are behaving as if we
are still back in the caves,” Johnson says,
when we get onto the subject of women’s
lives.
“It’s this whole crisis of narcissism, too –
everybody’s locked in their own little thing
and they whinge and moan. I’m not even 60
yet, but I’m pretty grumpy.” Actually, John-
son is wry, entertaining, erudite company.
But it comes as no surprise that she’s a fan
of the loud, Australian, often grumpy and
currently unfashionable Germaine Greer.
“Germaine can be quite batty, but she’s mar-
vellous. I love her.”
Well, she’s a battler. When we speak,
Johnson refers to “growing up as a little
disabled person”. In West Island she writes
of being a “buck-toothed lippy half-crippled
skinny girl” and of “sore, malformed feet
barely responding to seven or eight lengthyoperations”. She’s known pain, doesn’t
dwell on it but can clearly spot it in others.
“Look how thin she is,” she says, of a photo
of Devanny in her book. “You can just see
the terrible hardship. She deserves to have
her name up in lights.”
When Devanny wrote her compelling
1926 novel The Butcher Shop, it was banned
in New Zealand for being indecent (read
feminist) and for its politics. Devanny had
a lot of tragedy in her life. She lost twoStephanie Johnson in her
Grey Lynn home and, left,
at the time of her initial
departure for “West Island”.