Publisher's Synopsis
"A Fortunate Life", Albert Facey's autobiography, has sold over 500,000 copies, and has spawned a successful television mini-series. Facey is everyman. He was a bush-worker, soldier at Gallipoli, unionist, farmer, family man and suburban home-improver. "A Fortunate Life", besides all its other virtues, is an excellent introduction to the social history of his time.;This book looks at Facey's world, starting from what he tells us. It moves in the directions he points - to families broken up by depression and death, to children juggling school and work, to new opportunities on the land, to Aborigines and drovers in the outback, to boxing tents at country shows, to happy marriages. It also uncovers something which Facey does not tell us about and what perhaps he never knew: his family's history before his own appearance. The world in which Facey grew up, among farmers, workers and miners, is the same world described in Henry Lawson's stories. This book brings these two famous Australian authors together in a novel way. After each chapter on Facey and his times there is a Lawson story on the same theme.
