The world in which they find themselves is ripe for amelioration. Edward Street is a row of tin huts in a Housing Commission camp near Sydney, where the Sparrows are housed after they fall behind in their rent. The camp is barren, colourless, alternately sweltering or freezing, and peopled by the destitute and the hopeless. Stead’s motive in writing the novel was to make her children aware of the time she spent in the Bradfield Park Housing Commission camp at Lindfield, New South Wales.

Even with her firsthand knowledge of the Sparrows’ plight, Stead writes about it with her customary humour and lightness of touch, familiar to readers of her previous novel The Gospel of Gods and Crocodiles (2007). More amused than regretful about living in the shadow of her famous aunt Christina, Stead – a consummate storyteller – did not publish her first novel until her early sixties (she is now in her late seventies).

The narrator of her latest novel embodies postwar optimism. Aria Sparrow bursts onto the stage on the first page. On the brink of womanhood, Aria still has the childlike qualities of unaffectedness, spontaneity, and egotism. Lacking the doubts and reflection of an adult, she is the perfect vehicle for effecting change. She burns bright with an enthusiasm to make the world a better place. She acts without hesitation or apology. With her refrain of ‘I’m not sorry’, Aria defies her sister’s embarrassment and her mother’s more circumspect behaviour. Nor is she averse to swearing. She regales the reader with her love of make-believe and her humour, lighting up the cast of characters: the affable rabbit catcher Mr Sparkle, the damaged war veteran Mr Gardiner, the health freak Mr Kellog, the women of the laundry circle, and Mrs ‘Bloody Up Herself’ Glass.

In my daydreams I’d cut the health freak’s throat, and watch the grain spill out, stained with his gory blood; I’d choke him with barley; I’d bury him alive in bean sprouts; I’d drown him in seaweed; I’d grow rice in his ears; and while I planned my own murderous methods, I had my first orgasm.

The novel charts the Sparrow family’s progress through the seasons of one year, as these sharp and scavenging creatures take every crumb they can find to survive and prosper. Stead’s characters and images are painted in the vivid colours of a child’s imagination. Aria’s mother, Hanora, a frail creature with a dependence on ‘calm-me-down’ pills, was once a child who ‘felt like a crushed Sao biscuit at the bottom of a tin of assorted creams’. Her younger sister, Rosy – ‘the maiden all forlorn’ – is a foil to Aria’s bravura. She prefers to conform, and dreads the moment the terrible secret of her address will be revealed to Madame, her milliner employer.

Although reminiscent of British village tales, The Sparrows of Edward Street has a refreshingly Australian point of view expressed through the protagonist’s cocksure attitude. Aria works as a photographic model in an advertising agency, paid to ‘love’ the domestic aids and cosmetics that the housewives of the 1950s craved: cold cream, oven cleaner, and jelly crystals. She is virtuous but worldly, and ready to use her assets, or ‘currencies’ as she calls her breasts, to make a living and outwit the men who stand in her way.

The name Aria is no accident, but an allusion to the musical theme that is like a silver thread through the gloom of the camp. Her sickly, genteel mother fills Aria’s impoverished life with classical music and advocates a diet of ‘bread, music and stories’. Classical music spills out of the Sparrows’ hut, where Hanora invites the residents to come and borrow books from her unofficial lending library. Stead’s prose has its own rhythm, played con brio.

The only discordant note is an occasional heavy-handedness in relaying too much through dialogue. Hanora, born a Jew but now an atheist, lays down her cards. ‘It’s lovely to be an atheist and not have to hate anybody.’ This sounds more a barely veiled political comment from the author, whose father, like Mr Sparrow, was a communist. And Hanora is a little too eager to explain her propensity for pill-popping: ‘I’m in love with doctors and chemists and their little bottles and packets, and we don’t have to pay so much now that our dear old government has started its pharmaceutical benefit scheme.’

The novel pays homage to naïveté. It traces a trajectory from despair to hope, as the Sparrows overcome their hardships and succeed in leaving the camp. But, along the way, hope and spontaneous action transform their own lives and the lives of those around them, and the goal becomes irrelevant. Happiness does not depend on getting what we want.