How Mungo Came to Hydra
- Anna Kwiecinska
- Oct 16
- 3 min read
by Paul Genoni and Tanya Dalziell
(An edited extract from Half the Perfect World: Writers, Dreamers and Drifters on Hydra, 1955-1964, Monash University Publishing, 2018)
Charmian Clift and George Johnston developed a considerable reputation on Hydra for their hospitality. As a result newcomers to the island—whether they were passing through or looking for a place to stay—were often directed to the established Australian couple. This could be tiring and distracting, but as Clift later conceded she and Johnston nonetheless felt the need “to preserve a reputation for hospitality of which we were proud”.
Some of the unexpected visitors were Australian, which meant they might also arrive with pre-exiting ‘connections’. One of these was the future journalist and political commentator Mungo MacCallum, whose father, Mungo Snr, had been a colleague of Johnston’s in Sydney. The story of young Mungo’s time on Hydra is indicative in the ways in which the changing world was rapidly changing as the ‘sixties’ unfolded.
In early 1963 MacCallum had recently finished a degree at Sydney University and just turned 21 when he set out with several university friends on what was becoming a rite of passage for adventurous young Australians. They joined the emerging ‘hippie trail’ by setting out to drive the Indian sub-continent and Eastern Europe in search of adventure (and perhaps even enlightenment) in lands far removed from middle-class Australia.
Mungo’s travels unexpectedly ended, however, early in Delhi. There he received a phone call from his father informing him that Sue McGowan, the girlfriend he had left behind in Sydney, was pregnant. The second part of this unexpected news was that Sue would be put on the first available boat to Athens where the young couple were to be wed. While waiting for Sue to arrive Mungo was to make his way to Hydra where it was arranged that he would be ‘looked after’ by the Johnstons. Following instructions, MacCallum abandoned his transcontinental journey and travelled to Hydra, later recalling that, “George and Charmian made me feel welcome immediately, and I fell in love with them.”
Mungo was also able to pass the time by reading a manuscript copy My Brother Jack, the novel Johnston was then writing. He found that he “enthusiastically agreed” with Clift’s assessment that this was the “Great Australian Novel.”
Mungo eventually returned to Athens to greet Sue and to bring her to Hydra. They then returned again to Athens for both their wedding and the birth of their daughter, Diana, in early September. Mungo’s mother, Diana, also arrived in the Greek capital for both the wedding and birth of her grandchild. Mungo described his mother’s arrival as “well-meaning but a bit of a mixed blessing: she tried to hide it but she was clearly appalled at our casualness and ineptitude.”
Diana MacCallum then joined her son and daughter-in-law when they returned once more to Hydra with the new-born Diana, who soon after acquired Clift and Leonard Cohen as god-parents in an Orthodox baptism.
After remaining on Hydra for several more months Mungo and Sue moved on to London. Once there they encountered the influx of postwar Australian expatriates who were enjoying the Anglo-sphere capital was a home-away-from-home, with Mungo reporting that “We spent most of our spare time with Australian friends; our group from Sydney Uni had now moved almost en masse to the mother country.” This normalisation of expatriation for young Australians was becoming an accepted path to adulthood—a means of shaking of provincialism in favour of a safe starting point in a far more cosmopolitan world. And with London on the cusp of an upsurge of international youth culture the long post-war was definitively ended.
Within months Clift and Johnston—having been resident on Aegean islands for nearly a decade—would be swept back to Sydney, with Johnston brandishing the just-published My Brother Jack. There they would find themselves coming to terms with a greatly changed city and country, and with drastically altered personal circumstances.
'An Island in The Mind' is the retreat for readers, writers and curious travellers taking place on Hydra with the authors of Half the Perfect World: Writers, Dreamers and Drifters on Hydra, 1955-1964.
You can follow this retreat (17-23 October 2025) on IG and Facebook @writingbythesea_inhydra.
The NEXT ITERATION OF THIS RETREAT will be 23-29 MAY 2027 on HYDRA, and priority list is now open to accept your expression of interest to join us.
For further information please contact the curator Anna Kwiecinska
whats app +94 75 660 7713
Went to a reading by Mungo M at a Byron Bay bookshop about ten years ago. It must have been his history of Australian PMs. A likeable, learned guy. (In 1963 I was beginning my own European story, in Lausanne.)