Ghost Child

Noeline Kyle grew up on dairy farms, timber mills, in small villages and went to several bush schools on the Upper Macleay, NSW. Ghost child: a memoir is her story of those childhood years. Noeline had to trawl through family histories, school records, newspapers, oral histories, museum data, and library and archival material to fill in the blank spaces of a childhood lived so long ago it is almost lost in the mists of time. This is a story of childhood but it is also a story of small farmers struggling to make a living at a time when dairy farming is already in decline. And sitting on the hard wooden benches of the little bush school the child finds and begins to love writing and reading and words on the page and she lifts her head to peer into a dimly lit beckoning future. Noeline ‘went back to school’ in 1975 after 20 years working in many different jobs and fell in love with history, a research and writing journey she has followed since. A retired academic, Noeline is now a full-time writer, workshop/seminar speaker and she works to support the research and writing of local, family and life writing within the community.