The suburb that is the focus of the stories is South Perth and one can’t help thinking how unlike our contemporary suburbs this was. Certainly it was semi-rural and alive with possibilities for adventure and discovery: it does not begin to display the regimentation and restriction of new, post-war suburbs. Without the dazzling diversions of video, TV, and computer games, the young Hungerford was dependent upon his own resources and onto his world he projected a sense of wonder. South Perth was the birthplace of his imagination. This is poignantly brought home to the reader in a story, one of the best in the book, entitled ‘The New Kid and the Racecourse Goanna’. It is about a boy of wealthier parents than Hungerford’s, who has come to live in South Perth in the hope that it will distance him from petty crime with which he has become engaged in the city. The new kid seems now perhaps to be a familiar type – he treats the world with the brutal indifference with which, it is suggested, he has been treated by his materialist, affectionless parents. Unlike the goanna, whose back he breaks for the sheer hell of it, he does not belong anywhere. The goanna, it is emphasised, belongs to South Perth, as does the young Hungerford. Not for the new kid a world of passing wonder where ‘you had to find a name for everything so you could tell other people about it’. These stories celebrate a world that mattered.

South Perth was a lucky place indeed for the author, his brother, and two sisters to be raised, but not lucky because it was a place to exploit and in which wealth could be accumulated. Hungerford’s father was a shopkeeper who scratched a living and it is evident from the stories that both of his parents passed on to the child a delight in wit and imagination. His mother, whilst he is still young, delights in telling him that their dog is a magic dog because of his seemingly miraculous reappearance inside the house after he has been put out, ‘who could come in through the keyhole’. His father tells him that thunder ‘was only Mr Roberts rolling his new rainwater tank down his driveway from the road, where the carrier had left it, and that lightning was just the angels lighting their cigarettes’. Subsequently perhaps, the imagination of the boy is equally adventurous, free-ranging, and mischievous. In his world there is bird-nesting and hunts for crabs (and selling them to a posh onlooker from a city club); there are pet bantams and also Biddy their cow; there is swimming, fighting, and scintillating risk. This openness to experience is reflected in the style of writing which is clear, colloquial, pacy, and unclotted. It is also reflected in the structure of the stories where the recalling of one experience often diverges into the recalling of a complementary episode, and then returns to the original tack. This provides a suitable sense of variety and engagement which seemed limitless:

Sunday morning when you’d finished your jobs was a wonderful time. It was like standing at the front door of a big shop with everything in the world in it, and not knowing what to buy because there was so much. We could go down to the Chinamen’s for goldfish, or catch mice in the chaff­shed, or go fishing, or go down to the Zoo or out to the bush for eggs. We could dangle our legs in old Billy Bew’s well to catch leeches – a boy at school reckoned chemists bought them from you to make medicine, but every chemist we’d tried so far had hunted us out of his shop. We could rearrange our egg collection, or look at the Chums annual my uncle sent us from England every Christmas, or climb the lilac tree over the stable and play Tarzan. Or we could walk along the tram track in Angelo Street and pick up used tickets – everyone said there was an office in the carbarn in Perth where the tramways would buy them back from you to use again. There were so many things to do in one day ...

The stories are alive with affectionately rendered details of the period and anyone with an extra-literary interest in the habits of people at this time will find a superb chronicle in this book. Naturally, all is not rosy and the young Hungerford is aware of this. The debt collecting that he accomplishes with mixed success for his father brings him into direct contact with extreme poverty. A number of the stories focus upon ‘fringe’ dwellers – the Chinese market gardeners, Aboriginals, and a local homeless gent who, it was rumoured, put kids in his sugar bag and carried them away. This adult ruse is disproved by the boy who finds him to be kindly and communicative. This is but one instance where the child shows himself to be free of adult prejudice. It is interesting to note that at this time government aid to the unemployed was referred to as a ‘subsistence’ rather than a ‘benefit’ – no patronisation implied there.

One of the later stories ‘Milly, Mollie and Mae’ delightfully establishes the bewilderment and innocence of three young Aboriginal girls who arrive in town on a trip south from Carnarvon. By this time the author is a young man with a job on the Daily News and is making a little money on the side as a dance instructor. It is in this role that he comes into contact with the girls and is fascinated by their ‘difference’. Mae reveres him because she has seen his picture in the paper and, at their final lesson, asks for his autograph. Their departure raises speculation as to what will happen to the girl in Carnarvon, ‘waiting for some stockman or commercial traveller up from Perth to come out (from the pub) and offer her a couple of bob to go round under the tank-stand’. It’s a poignant story.

Some readers of contemporary fiction may find these stories rather old-fashioned. The author never questions his recall of this accountable world, the perspective is singular, and there is no sense of disjunction between the past and the present. Nevertheless the author’s style suits his purpose. The final story in the book however foreshadows an end to innocence. Newspapers are dominated by massive headlines about trouble in Europe which all seems unreal and so far away from the companionship of young women, the surf booming in the background. But war has become inevitable:

We were like people in a run-away car charging downhill toward a precipice: knowing we were done for but still hoping something would happen to make the brakes work. And in another way you hoped that after so long mucking about it would happen, and one way or another get you off the hook.