Hear the Train Blow: The classic autobiography of growing up in the bush - Tapa blanda

Patricia Jean Smith and her sister, Miss Mickie, grew up as railway children, their parents a station-mistress and a fettler. The catalogue of towns they lived in reverberates with the once-familiar clatter of metal and steam, but it was the tiny one-pub town of Waaia, in the centre of Victoria's wheat-rich Goulburn Valley, that kept drawing them back. These were days of yabbying and rabbiting, of bush girls riding bareback on wilful ponies, and of the tin-lizzies that transformed the Mallee forever. It was a time for learning, for devouring books and for satisfying a powerful thirst for knowledge. And then it was a time for war. Hear the Train Blow tells of Patsy Adam-Smith's classic upbringing during the Great Depression. It is a celebration of the ordinary people of Australia, and of a life that no longer exists.

PATSY ADAM-SMITH was one of Australia's best-known and best-loved authors. Awarded the O.B.E. in 1980 for services to literature and the Order of Australia in 1994 for services to recording oral history, she was the author of thirty books, all of which have topped or appeared on bestseller lists. Among her most popular books were Hear the Train Blow (the story of her childhood), The Shearers , Australian Women at War , Heart of Exile , There Was a Ship , Outback Heroes and The Anzacs , which was joint winner of The Age Book of the Year Award in 1978. Prisoners of War received the prestigious triennial Order of Australia Association Book Prize in 1993.