The lost decade between 1945 and 1955 –
between the death of Glenn Miller and the birth of Rock’n’Roll – was filled
with returned war-damaged men, newly-independent women, and a welter of kids
caught between the two. It was a period of manic reconstruction, when
working-class families would do anything for a house of their own, usually in
one of the new paddock suburbs, and in a world undergoing enormous transition.
This is the story of one of those
families, and of one of those frontier suburbs and the lives of the people it
contained.
Allan and Dorothy Pryor are a pair of
small-town, country-bred teens, both natural loners, and each with impossible aspirations.
The meet, get pregnant, marry, give up on their separate dreams and move to the
city, buckle down to the slog of raising kids, but soon drift apart, both using
World War II as an escape.
After the war, and as much more mature
people, now with three pre-war daughters and a mid-war son, they get back
together and take up a block in a new suburb at the margins and set about
building a house in the face of crippling shortages.
Tackling this new age with them is an
assortment of inter-acting families and characters – a blunt old farmer and his
wife, who lost their only son at Buna; a war-broken American single father
raising a headstrong girl and her crippled twin brother in a shed; a
sixty-year-old man helping his deserted daughter-in-law raise ten kids in a
railway carriage; Dorothy’s estranged half-brother; and a cynical young
ex-gunner who falls for one of Allan and Dorothy’s too-young daughters.
Together this mis-matched collection of
battlers struggle to re-build their damaged lives, their relationships, and
their families, while turning a tract of farm paddocks into a neighbourhood.
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