From Nanango to Cooktown: The Queensland Memoir of a Mining Warden’s Daughter 1930-1955

And not just of Queensland at no particular time, but of bush Queensland in the make-and-break era of the Great Depression in the 1930s and WW2 in the 1940s and the post-war recovery in the 1950s. Lennie faithfully follows her mining warden Dad from Nanango to Goondiwindi, to Tully, to Charters Towers, back to Tully, on to Cooktown, over to Butcher’s Hill, then to nursing training in Bundaberg and finally back to marriage in Butcher’s Hill. There is no theoretical sociology or grandiose politics in these homespun memoirs of Lennie Wallace. Instead there are exuberant and intimate portraits of old-fashioned family life and loyal friends, brilliant little anecdotes about horses, dogs, chooks and humans and a wonderful dry bush sense of humour.