Introduction

In the winter of 1948, a poorly educated jack-of-all-trades moved his ever-increasing family to a small vegetable crops' farm on the Darling Downs, in Queensland. They arrived in a horse and wagon to begin an extraordinary life of hardship and challenge in the bush.

This book follows the harsh life of poverty that is eclipsed by the threads of dry humour, love and warmth that embraces a large closely-knit family. The living conditions endured are almost primitive, even for the nineteen fifties, as they fight to carve an existence from the land.

His father's lingering fight with lung cancer compounds the pain of his own battle, as a National Service Soldier in the Vietnam War. The accounts of the war are graphic and poignant, and could only emerge from one who has experienced the frightening reality of combat. Highlighted through the suffering and dreams is a mother's undying devotion to her family, as she struggles to raise them, more or less on her own.