January, Melbourne, hot mid-summer.

The holidays fizzle in a kind of endless dryness. A heat haze off the bitumen and the ache of the afternoon sun. A bunch of kids starts grade six at Peel Street School. It’s the high tide of the post-war migrant boom; every term there’s someone new - from England, Ireland, Italy, Greece, Germany, Hungary, Holland, Russia... It’s a magical year, the last year of innocence, a year poised between new growth and the hardening of a tangible future - the last year before adolescence decides who will thrive, who will struggle and who will falter...