From the best-selling author of Mailman of the Birdsville Track comes the memoir of an Australian country town entwined with four generations of family history.
Told through the childhood reminiscences of Weidenbach father, Neil, Growing up Moonta paints a picture of a time when an illegitimate child was raised as a sister to her mother, travelling salesmen made a living hawking dressmakers’ pins and bottles of antiseptic salve, and boys grew to men lumping bags of wheat and tending engines in the town power houses of the 1930s.
Young Neil and his forebears absorbed the quirky anecdotes of South Australia’s famous coppermining town — from the infamous murders and the boys who went to war, to the rhythms of everyday life such as the butcher carving meat at the back of his horse and cart, and the women competing on Mondays to hang their washing on the line first.
Growing up Moonta transports readers to a time not so long ago, but a way of life long passed; a place redolent with nostalgia that lives on in the stories of our parents and grandparents.
‘I revelled in this history of the town: a book teeming with characters and incident…The world might be a global village, but a village has always contained a whole world of stories.’ — Peter Goldsworthy
