AustLit

'In the 1980s, Rob Willis, National Library folklorist and oral historian, began collecting stories of the dairy-farming families along the Nulla Nulla Creek on the Upper Macleay River, which runs through the hinterland between Coffs Harbour and Port Macquarie. He completed more than 30 interviews of early settlers and their families. Many of these were with the Kyle family, including my father, Lawrence ‘Lawrie’ Kyle, who was interviewed in 2002 when he was 90 years of age, his sisters ‘Alice’ Grace Partridge and Mary Hudson, his brother Allan Kyle and cousins Vaughan Kyle, Brian Kyle, Geoffrey Kyle, Jack Kyle, Joe Kyle and Coral Ball. My father’s exploits, both the exciting and the problematic, emerged often enough in these interviews to fill a special recording of what Rob and I now refer to as The Lawrie Stories.'  (Introduction)

'Noeline Kyle lived all of her childhood in the shadow of mountains and trees along the banks of the Upper Macleay River and near the small gullies and creeks that snaked around and through them. Her childhood story begins as World War II looms and ends as she closes the school gate for the last time. Her father, an itinerant worker, is often out of work, is sometimes just away somewhere. It is an uncertain, ever-shifting family environ and her mother is unhappy in its rough and wild spaces. This is a story of bush children growing up in 1940s rural poverty. The family moves often, there is constant upheaval and no safe haven from the misery of it all. But on the farm of her Grandfather Billy Kyle the child finds a brief sanctuary from the insecurity of her parent’s unhappiness. And it is her young aunts with their generous hearts, the steady support of grandparents and friends who provide the tiny pieces of warmth, laughter and hope to leaven the bitterness and hurt of an unhappy family life. Noeline had to trawl through family histories, school records, newspaper reports, oral histories, museum data, and library and archival material to fill in some of the blank spaces left by a childhood lived so long ago; a childhood whose history was scattered, lost perhaps in the ghostly landscape scarcely able to be remembered at all. This childhood, her childhood, is partly a paean to the many myths, misunderstandings and misconceptions now clouding that past. It is also a story of how the history of childhood, any childhood, cannot be any more than the sum of its many wavering, ghostly and almost unknowable events.' (Publication summary)