I was delighted to spin A Fortunate Life by A.B. Facey in the Classics Club spin # 43. This book is an Australian classic, the autobiography of a man born in Maidstone in Melbourne in 1894 who, despite growing up illiterate, wrote one of the most loved Australian books of all time.
As a young fellow, Albert Facey didn’t have a fortunate life at all. The first section began with the words, ‘Many people had little feeling or sympathy for those in need,’ which generally turned out to be the author’s experience throughout his childhood.
Born into extreme poverty, Albert’s father died when he was two, the youngest of seven children. At the time Albert’s two eldest brothers had been at the Western Australian goldfields with their father, and before long, his mother deserted him and his other brothers and sisters, leaving them in the care of the elderly grandparents to go to Western Australia too. After his grandfather died a few years later, his grandmother sold up what little she had and took the remaining children to Western Australia in the hopes of their mother taking on her children again, only to find she had remarried, was pregnant again and was unable or unwilling to take more than one of her daughters, most likely because her daughter would be useful to her. An Uncle took pity on the family and took in Albert, his grandmother and another sibling (another daughter had been left in Victoria to look after another uncle) at at his farm in Wickepin, about 200 kilometres south east of Perth.
It was a stretch for Albert’s uncle to feed the extra mouths so when he was about eight Albert was sent to live with an elderly lady as a farm worker, where was brutally mistreated by her family of criminals. After recovering from a horse-whipping that almost killed him Albert ran away, walking bare-footed over several nights to return to the farm and his beloved grandmother.
This part of the story was very hard reading. The author wrote matter of factly about his trials but they reminded me of stories where the hero cannot catch a break, where things just get worse and worse and worse. Unlike a novel, though, this was real.
Albert, now aged eleven, was hired out again to a poultry farmer, but after several months had not been paid or clothed as he had been promised, so he left there to work at another farm about five miles from the first. Albert worked there for a week before learning that again, he would not be paid, so he returned to his grandmother and uncle.
The people at the next place where Albert was sent to work were kinder and grew very fond of him. Their own son had died and they wanted to adopt Albert and send him to school, but when his mother, whom he barely knew, refused their offer the relationship soured.
Interspersed between the bigger details of Albert’s life were the daily happenings, stories of life on remote farms as they were being cleared of trees and growth to create farmland to grow wheat and support sheep or pigs or cattle, with many funny stories of mishaps. One time young Albert got stuck in a tree after being chased by a ferocious boar, and of course, this being Australia, there were terrifying tales of snakebites and horse thieves, and dingoes howling all night. Despite all of the hardships and injustices, Albert always saw the funny side of life and some of his stories were hilarious.
At the age of fourteen Albert went to Perth to live with his mother, where he quickly learned that he was expected to support himself financially by paying his mother and her husband board. Albert realised his mother was more interested in money than in him, so signed on for a six-month stint droving cattle over a thousand-kilometre route. He had plenty of adventures during this time too, including getting lost in the bush when the cattle stampeded during a thunderstorm and being saved by Aboriginals. His own bush skills, already good, continued to improve and he grew into the type of man who could turn his hand to anything.
During this time Albert taught himself to read and write, although he never attended school. Around the age of 18 he became a professional boxer with a travelling troupe, and was in Sydney when World War One broke out. Two of Albert’s brothers were killed at Gallipoli, and Albert himself was badly wounded there also and sent home to Australia. He wrote of war openly and in plain words, as he did all of his stories, describing horrors that I found almost to much to read.
While at Gallipoli Albert had received a pair of hand-knitted socks in a parcel sent by a member of the Bunbury Girl Guides from Western Australia. Albert asked the soldiers from Bunbury if they knew Evelyn Gibson, the girl who had knitted his socks and they said they did, that she was ‘a good-looker and very smart, and that she came from a well-liked and respected family.’ In an extraordinary coincidence Albert met Evelyn while he was recuperating in Perth and they started knocking about together, fell in love and married.
From then on, Albert was part of a ‘we.’ He and Evelyn lived in Perth for a few years where Albert worked on the trams, later moving to Wickepin where they took up land as part of the government’s soldier settlement scheme. They worked hard, but went through all of the ups and downs that still plague farmers, including droughts, the depression years and crop prices too low for anyone to make a living from. One of the worst ‘downs’ was a result of a silly mistake that caused their house to burn down, a common event of the time. Albert and Evelyn had seven children and were married for sixty years, and I admit that big, heaving gulps got the better of me when Albert told of his wife’s death.
I’ve delved a little into the author’s story and it seems as if some of his stories were exaggerated or improved on for publication, but Albert Facey’s voice as a storyteller was direct, humble and sincere. I could almost hear his voice telling me his story of his life, and thought that despite living what I would consider to be a very hard life indeed, that he thought his life was fortunate, was wonderful.
Reading about the author’s experiences of clearing land for farming purposes brought up mixed emotions for me, as my grandparents, great-grandparents and great-great grandparents must have worked just as physically hard and lived in similar rough conditions. I wish they had left more trees, bush and scrub, though, as do most of my generation! Albert wrote many times of his fear of Aboriginal people, which added to my unease about a question I wonder about but can never know the answer to, were any of my relatives personally responsible for the murders or driving away of Aboriginal people from their districts? There would have been a code of silence among the settlers responsible at the time, even if they weren’t involved they wouldn’t have told the authorities who was, and the stories didn’t get told to the next generation, at least not in my family if the did. I feel the guilt anyway, as I’ve said many times before, I’ve had a good life as a descendant of convicts.
My edition was illustrated by Robert Juniper, an Western Australian artist whose line drawings throughout and dusty, red-dirt cover reflected the story perfectly.
In a funny little side note, my copy contained a handwritten page of a diary from someone unknown to me – my copy of A Fortunate Life has been on my shelves for thirty years and I cannot remember who gave it to me, although it might possibly have been the writer of the diary – who was camping somewhere near Peterborough on the Great Ocean Road for a fortnight over the Christmas break during 1995/1996. During this time, their family visited the cheese factory at Timboon, went up in the plane from Peterborough and flew over the Bay of Islands then across to Port Campbell and back, and another day they walked to the Bay of Martyrs for a swim where one of the children almost stepped on a snake. During the two weeks they were on holidays they caught 64 crayfish. 64! They must have been just picking them up off of the ocean floor! The diary was a reminder for me of summers gone by, and I thought it was fitting that I found it written on a blank page at the back of my book.
A Fortunate Life was book twenty-eight of my second Classics Club challenge to read 50 classics before my challenge end date of September 22, 2028.
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