Low Life | 23 May 2009

My last day in Australia I spent in Sydney. In the afternoon, under a blackening sky, I took the ferry out to Manly, sat on the beach and wrote a letter to my boy, enclosing a sample of Manly sand between the pages. Then I returned by ferry to Sydney, and on the way back to the hostel I stopped off at a city centre bookstore. While visiting Digger in Kalgoorlie, he’d praised a biography called A Fortunate Life as a classic of Australian literature, and I thought I’d see if they had a copy that I could look at and possibly buy.

A.B. Facey was born in the goldfields of Victoria in the 1890s. Aged two he lost his gold prospector father to typhoid and his mum left him in the care of his grandmother. He started work as a farm labourer aged eight. After visiting a country fair in his teens, he became a fairground boxer.