I just finished reading a very important book, an Australian classic titled A Fortunate Life, by Albert Facey. It's his autobiography of growing up in Western Australia from the early 1900s to the 1970s, and it's really an astonishing read. I can't believe it took me so long to get around to it, really.
Facey was born in Victoria in 1894, and by the time he was 5, his father had died, his mother had run off, his grandfather had died, his uncle had been hit by a train and crippled, and he and five of his siblings were living with his grandmother, who promptly took ill herself. From a young age, all the kids had huge responsibility for keeping the family above water. At the turn of the century, they shipped out to Western Australia, following his mother to the Goldfields. However, she wouldn't have anything to do with them, and so began a lifetime of bouncing from place to place and job to job.
Facey suffered an unbelievable amount of trauma through his early years, being rejected, pushed into virtual child slavery, beaten, and who knows what else- but through it all, he kept that spirit of survival, and he never let it get him down. In fact, more important to him than the awful people he met were the many wonderful people who helped him along the way, taking him in, teaching him, and treating him as their own son.
From a tough life around rural Western Australia, Facey enlisted in the Army in 1914 and landed at ANZAC Cove at Gallipoli in 1915. He was seriously injured four months later and sent home, where he met his wife, and proceeded to have seven kids while struggling to make ends meet. His eldest son was killed in World War II, but he went on to have almost 60 years of happy marriage, and at the end of his life he felt privileged to have been through all he had experienced.
Quite a hell of a guy, really. I was a little nervous picking the book up just at the moment, because a fair chunk of Facey's life is very similar to my main character Bill's life. I'd hate to see it suggested in the future that I took any inspiration from Facey for events that are completely fictional. I needn't have worried, though- both were born around the same time, lived and worked in the same area, and had the rest of their lives affected by going away to the Great War.
However, that's where the similarity ends. Every event in Bill's life is different.
What I can take from Facey's story is an incredible amount of information about what it was really like to live and work in rural Western Australia at that time, from the farm machinery to the price of food. I'm so glad I picked it up, because the details are much more immediate to me now.
Not to mention that the story in itself is so inspiring- no matter how many times he was knocked down, Albert kept getting up, and more than that- he was thankful for it. Not thankful to God- in fact, he makes a rather adamant declaration that there is no God- but simply thankful for the opportunity to see another day.
It's a great reminder of how we should all approach life, I think.
Excerpt from Between the Lines
A memory wavered into his mind, shimmery as heat rising off the road in summer.
He was six years old, and he’d been in Stonehaven no more than a week. He was hollow and lonely, confused. He missed the bustle of Melbourne. He missed the other kids on his street, the whole gang of them and their scampy games. He was stuck out in the bush, all of a sudden, with nobody but Lionel for company. Lionel had spent the first day ignoring him completely, and the last few beating the stuffing out of him whenever he got the chance. So that day, he’d wandered out to the back garden, if it could even be called that- just a scrubbed, flat expanse of hot red dirt with a veil of tangled trees and shrubs behind it.
The bush.
On impulse, he’d taken a couple of steps toward it, bare feet burning on the hot ground. The air was filled with the lemony scent of eucalyptus and the fresh tang of the distant sea. He'd filled his lungs and the two steps had turned into six, then ten, then before he knew it he was running headlong toward the wall of whispering green and brown, pushing all his mother’s warnings about snakes and savages from his head. He barrelled between the first spicy-scented leaves and, to his surprise, popped out on a sort of beaten down track, hidden from view of the house. After a moment’s pause to wonder how many strokes of the belt he’d get for this, he set off down the track toward the most interesting noise he’d heard so far- the babbling giggle of flowing water, and laced in with it, the high, clear notes of a girl’s voice, singing.
He stepped off the track with his heart hammering in his chest, suddenly terrified as he caught side of the wide river bank and the rolling mass of glassy green water.
She was standing there, all right- a girl not much taller than him, skinny as a rake, skin the golden brown of tree bark lit by sun. A cascade of golden curls rolled over her shoulders to skim at her waist, tendrils flicking out here and there as she drew back her arm and lobbed a big rock into the water.
He watched it go, traced the arc with his eyes until it hit the water with a loud splash and was swallowed. She was singing, still, her voice high and clear. She was wearing a white dress that finished at her knees and puffed into short sleeves at her shoulders. He looked down at himself, his grey shorts and jumper coated in jam, dirt and everything else he’d been busy with that morning. He stared at her back with suspicion. She was pristine. The only dirty bit of her was her feet, bare as his.
If it hadn’t been for those feet, he might have thought she was an angel. Or a ghost.
Sunday, June 8, 2008
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1 comments:
Oh, I love this book, too! The fact that he can still view his life as a fortunate one, after all that happens to him, is so inspiring. And I think he wrote the book when he was in his 70s, if memeory serves me. Just fantastic!
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