Up We Grew

Book excerpt: 'Bone's voice has definition in an ocean of mediocre peers.' Weekend Australian 'Up We Grew is a reflective, whimsical book full of personal memories, both sweet and sour...Bone offers a deliciously colourful patchwork of memories carefully chosen and beautifully written. Her vivid pictures come easily to life.' The Age '[Bone] has the journalist's sense of looking beneath the veneer of what childhood appears to be, to see what is really going on.' Sunday Tasmanian Resilience. Why do some children in difficult circumstances seem blessed with it, while others struggle to cope with life? And are Australian children generally less resilient than they used to be? In Up We Grew, award-winning journalist Pamela Bone explores the Australian childhood through the prism of her own experience as a daughter, a sister and a mother. Taking as her starting point her own story of growing up in a small town on the Murray River after the war, Bone illuminates the influences that shape us from early life: family, friendships, school. Through interviews with Helen Coonan, Max Gillies, Terry Lane, Mark Latham, Michael Leunig, Joanna Murray-Smith and Natasha Stott Despoja, she considers how some famous and less well-known Australians coped with the death of a parent, divorce, difference, talent, opportunity, money, or the lack thereof. Richly researched and vividly written, by turns nostalgic and unblinkingly sentimental, Up We Grew provides remarkable insight into how we are tempered and transformed by our childhood.