What can I say - this novel is an Aus Lit classic or I don't know my aorta from my elbow. And the author should be publicly pissed on for not having the balls to get up off his skinny backside and attack the world of commercial publishing so that it could've claimed its birthright.
Why? - because not only is it a history of a now long-gone Time in Aus, of how we went about re-building our little part of the fractured world that existed for a universal nano-second between Glenn Miller and Bill Haley, but it rocks along, full of strength and passion, in that other battle we all had to fight after the war, to reconstruct our lives and loves and families. Sometime with mixed results. Because we were all pretty average human beings.
When I pulled this one out - my last re-read of the four - I thought I would find it to be the lesser of them, but about half way in - it's been 17 years since I read it - I was wishing someone else had written it, so I could cherish a copy for the right reasons. Because in fact it's the best, strong characters with just the right amount of complexity (all real people), and it moves constantly between action, personality, landscape, the changing historical time, and the resourcefulness of this cluster of dogged battlers who had the task of turning old wheat paddocks into some resemblance of suburban heaven, without the help of electricity, sewerage, Bunnings Hardware, or the bloody internet!
I lived every word of this novel, and about 95% of me is these pages - body, mind, soul, memories, philosophies, talents - and to be perfectly honest, I can't quite believe I wrote it. It's actually better than me. I know I'll never find this much of The Ghost in me ever again.
Cheers...
T.R.E.
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>