Jeremy Clarke Jeremy Clarke

Low Life | 23 May 2009

Essential values

My last day in Australia I spent in Sydney. In the afternoon, under a blackening sky, I took the ferry out to Manly, sat on the beach and wrote a letter to my boy, enclosing a sample of Manly sand between the pages. Then I returned by ferry to Sydney, and on the way back to the hostel I stopped off at a city centre bookstore. While visiting Digger in Kalgoorlie, he’d praised a biography called A Fortunate Life as a classic of Australian literature, and I thought I’d see if they had a copy that I could look at and possibly buy.

A.B. Facey was born in the goldfields of Victoria in the 1890s. Aged two he lost his gold prospector father to typhoid and his mum left him in the care of his grandmother. He started work as a farm labourer aged eight. After visiting a country fair in his teens, he became a fairground boxer. He joined the army in 1915 and was wounded at Gallipoli. Two of his brothers were killed there.

After the war he tried farming under the Soldier Settlement Scheme, but the farm went under in the Great Depression. He went to work for the tramways and became a union organiser.

The great beauty of Facey’s book, said Digger, is in the powerful simplicity of the uneducated prose style and in Facey’s modesty, his fundamental decency, and in his indomitable spirit in spite of almost continual hardship. Publishing a memoir was far from Facey’s mind until late in his life when his family urged him to write down some of his experiences. He died nine months after the manuscript was published, in 1982. Australians immediately took this book to their hearts, said Digger, because in many ways it is an account of modern Australian history, and of the essential values of hard work, fortitude and physical courage that Australians particularly admire.

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