I think this memoir was perhaps primarily written for members of the family who featured in it. As such, it is an interesting documentation of Australian rural life in the mid 20th century, and how hard life was compared to now, and even compared to urban life in that era. Interesting to me, anyway, as I grew up in Australia not long after the period described and I enjoyed reminiscing about my own early life. I would be surprised, however, if others found this memoir quite as appealing. So many potentially significant personal events are glossed over or dealt with in just one or two sentences. The separation of the parents amounts to a couple of sentences right at the end. Did the author not have any sense of this development, especially in retrospect? There are only minimal hints of this. It seems that the writer was not a very astute observer of real human behaviour - or else she has chosen to withhold her observations from the reader. Most readers would probably find the author's style rather pedestrian and uninvolving as a result. In the end, it is rather Mont Python-esque. "Life was hard for us, but we didn't complain" is really the take home message. ( )