Hear the train blow is the true story of Patsy Adam-Smith’s bush upbringing during the Great Depression. These were days of yabbying and rabbiting, of learning to dance the three-hop polka, of tin-kettling newly-weds in the velvety blackness of night. Throughout it was a time for learning, for devouring books and for satisfying a powerful thirst for knowledge. And then it was time for war.
Goodbye Girlie takes up the story at the end of the Depression, when 17-year-old Patsy enlisted as a nurse in the army and in so doing set out into adulthood. Hers was a rich but troubled life. There was her illegitimacy; her family; her short-lived war-time marriage, which left her with two young children to raise alone; her years at sea and her loves. And, of course there is her career - a career that spans more than forty years and has produced thirty-one books.
