"The HOUSE in GONDWANALAND"
This novel is a true-ish story, that is it's autobiographical with just a few literary liberties taken. Available in e-book at Kindle and Kobo.
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The lost decade between 1945 and 1955 – between the death of Glenn Miller and the birth of Rock’n’Roll – was filled with returned war-damaged men, newly-independent women, and a welter of kids caught between the two. It was a period of manic reconstruction, when working-class families would do anything for a house of their own, usually in one of the new paddock suburbs, and in a world undergoing enormous transition.
This is the story not only one of those families, but of one of those frontier suburbs and the lives of the people it contains.
Allan and Dorothy Pryor are a pair of small-town, country-bred teens, both natural loners, and each with impossible aspirations. The meet, get pregnant, marry, give up on their separate dreams and move to the city, buckle down to the slog of raising kids, but soon drift apart, both using World War II as an escape.
After the war, and as much more mature people, now with three pre-war daughters and a mid-war son, they get back together and take up a block in a new suburb at the margins and set about building a house in the face of crippling shortages.
Tackling this new age with them is an assortment of inter-acting families and characters – a blunt old farmer and his wife, who lost their only son at Buna; a war-broken American single father raising a headstrong girl and her crippled twin brother in a shed; a sixty-year-old man helping his deserted daughter-in-law raise ten kids in a railway carriage; Dorothy’s estranged half-brother; and a cynical young ex-gunner who falls for one of Allan and Dorothy’s too-young daughters.
Together this mis-matched collection of battlers struggle to re-build their damaged lives, their relationships, and their families, while turning a tract of farm paddocks into a neighbourhood.
Together this mis-matched collection of battlers struggle to re-build their damaged lives, their relationships, and their families, while turning a tract of farm paddocks into a neighbourhood.