A strong bond is formed when a writer is able to conjure a reader’s early years. Whether it be the inner-city Melbourne of Helen Garner’s Monkey Grip or the Western Australian coastal setting of any number of Tim Winton’s novels, nothing weds us to an author quite like nostalgia for the days of barefoot summers and vast reserves of Ribena.
Books that fall into this special class can get away with all sorts of syntax problems and clunky prose if the author taps into the deep vein of what formed you, of who you are.
Sometimes they are classics you endured at school to re-discover later in life – in my case, My Brother Jack by George Johnston and pretty much everything by Thea Astley – or they are books to stave off homesickness when you have moved to a new city. I can still recall the locations – my bedroom, the family car, the back garden – where I devoured Colin Thiele’s stories. I grew up on the Gold Coast Hinterland and his evocation of the natural environment in his works Jodie’s Journey, Storm Boy and The Sun on the Stubble are unsurpassed.
When I moved to London, I turned not to the works of Chaucer or Dickens, but to Thiele’s childhood stories which I had not picked up for 20 years. They anchored me in my new, unfamiliar world, and reminded me of where home was.
To this day, I like to dawdle in the children and young adult sections of bookstores, not because I have a child of my own but because reading passages of my favourite childhood stories takes me back to that phase in my life when pure, uninterrupted reading, that total immersion in the moment, was still possible.
These are not always fond reminiscences, but they are no less powerful or affecting for that. I have a friend who has a fondness for Ruth Park’s The Harp in the South because reading about the run-down brothels and boarding houses of Surry Hills reminds her of her childhood in Melbourne’s erstwhile working class suburb of Richmond. That’s the thing about these books — they are not always homages to the stereotypical Australian beach or bush setting, but are as varied as those of us who have lived them.
What are the books that evoke your early years? Leave a comment below
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