PROLOGUE

      AFTER MY mother died in 2002 it took me a few years to get out all the papers she’d left and look through them. I was afraid it would be a mournful thing to do, but the first exercise book I opened spoke to me as if she was beside me, the warmth and humour of her voice alive still: I have often thought about writing a book—people do it all the time—it can’t be that hard. Up till now I’ve never had the time or the right pencil but now that I have one foot in the grave it’s time to get on with it. I opened another. There was her workmanlike handwriting saying: There must be a way of writing a story—I’m going to try this time to write it backwards.

      My mother’s many hopeful starts all petered out after a few pages. What she left was a mass of fragments. They often began with the stories about her forebears that she’d heard from her mother. Others were about her childhood. Most were about her adult life, up to her mid-forties. They taper away after that, perhaps because by then she felt less need to look back and try to understand.

      She often quoted Socrates’ famous maxim: The unexamined life is not worth living. That terse judgment stayed with her all her life, shaping her actions and consoling her when things seemed bleak. Her sense of the past and the great sweeps of change she’d seen made her want to record, and to do more than record—to work out how her own individual life was part of the wider world. That was the urge behind the rich patchwork of fragments I was reading.

      My mother wasn’t the sort of person biographies are usually written about. She wasn’t famous, had no public life beyond one letter published in the Sydney Morning Herald, did nothing that would ever make the history books. Just the same, I think her story is worth telling.

      Not many voices like hers are heard. People of her social class—she was the daughter of a rural working-class couple who became pub-keepers—hardly ever left any record of what they felt and thought and did. They often believed their lives weren’t important enough to write down, and in many cases they lacked the literacy and the leisure time to do so. As a result, our picture of the past is skewed towards the top lot. Their written documents are the basis for our histories, the nice things they owned fill our museums, their sonnets and novels shape our imaginations. In the bits and pieces of my mother’s written memories, I had a first-hand account of a world largely left out of those histories and museums and about which no sonnets, as far as I know, have been written.

      Yet her story represents that of a generation of people whose lives were unimaginably different from the lives of every generation of their families before them. When