Welcome to the personal website of Jason Johnston.
I am a solicitor (attorney to Americans) employed by Freehills, a large commercial law firm, in its Sydney office.
I work in the Projects practice group, where I am involved principally with environmental and planning law, but also with property and general commercial matters. I also do a great deal of pro bono work, including for such organisations as ACON (the AIDS Council of NSW), the NSW Disability Discrimation Legal Centre, the Australian division of Internationaler Hilfsfonds, the Australian Chamber Orchestra and also the Hunter-Central Rivers Catchment Management Authority in relation to the herculean Hexham Swamp Rehabilitation Project.
I have also worked in the Litigation practice group, where (among other things) I assisted:
I came to the law rather late in life, and before that I was a lecturer in linguistics in the Department of Linguistics of the University of Sydney. (The departmental website will explain what linguistics is.) I have also worked at the University of Queensland and the Central Coast Campus of the University of Newcastle.
Before linguistics, I was a subeditor in the Subtitling Unit of SBS (the Special Broadcasting Service, Australia's multilingual public broadcaster), an editor with legal and medical publishers Butterworths (now LexisNexis Australia), and a researcher and computer programmer with various organisations including the then Microsoft Research Institute.
I have also been a gardener, the pianist at a young girls' ballet school, and the accompanist to a not very successful French singer on the club circuit (though our rendition of Send In The Clowns was always very effective with more mature audiences). These youthful escapades (and there were others) are not included in my résumé.
I was born in 1956 on the Greek island of Hydra to expatriate Australian parents. Hydra was a paradise for me and my brother and sister, but a struggle (albeit a picturesque one) for my writer parents. When I was 5, they considered giving up the Greek-island experiment and we swapped houses with a family from the Cotswolds in England. That experiment in turn was, apparently, not a success (although I enjoyed novelties such as cars, television, domestic appliances and milk-vending machines) and after 6 months we returned to our own house on the island.
However, when I was 8, my family returned to Australia and settled in Sydney. I have lived here ever since (which is to say, for 40-odd years), apart from an 18-month stay with the family of one of my cousins in rural Victoria and a 6-month stint in Brisbane. For the last 10 years, I have lived in a (not very) converted warehouse in the inner-city suburb of Alexandria with my partner of more than 20 years.