67. A Fortunate Life by A.B. Facey

This is the story of the extraordinary life of an ordinary man - that's the description on the back of my copy of this autobiography. Albert Facey was born in 1894 in Victoria but then moved to Perth as a young child. Because of circumstance, he had to go to work by the age of 8 or 9 as a farmhand and the narrative follows his story from this point, through his experiences on the WA farms where he worked in his youth, to Gallipoli as a soldier at the landing, to life back in Australia during the Depression and through his marriage and parenthood until the early 1980s.

This is a really interesting book. I am so surprised that I have not come across it before. I don't know why I haven't as it's an Australian classic and something that I would naturally pick up, but there you go. It's on many senior school curricula here in Australia and I think it would be a nightmare to study with all the "characters" that come into Albert's life as the story progresses. As a written piece, you do really get a sense of the character of it's first person narrator though I became so engrossed in the story that I couldn't really tell you how this was developed. I'll have to read it again :) And I'll look forward to that!