Ghost child : a memoir

Resource Information

The work Ghost child : a memoir represents a distinct intellectual or artistic creation found in Ruth Faulkner Public Library - City of Belmont. This resource is a combination of several types including: Work, Language Material, Books.

Label

Ghost child : a memoir

Title remainder

a memoir

Statement of responsibility

Noeline Kyle

Creator

• Kyle, Noeline, 1940-

Subject

• Kyle, Noeline, 1940- -- Childhood and youth
• Kyle, Noeline, 1940- -- Family
• Women -- Australia -- Biography -- 20th century
• Autobiographies
• Country life -- Australia

Genre

• Biography
• Autobiographies

Summary

Noeline Kyle lived all of her childhood in the shadow of mountains and trees along the banks of the Upper Macleay River and near the small gullies and creeks that snaked around and through them. Her childhood story begins as World War II looms and ends as she closes the school gate for the last time. Her father, an itinerant worker, is often out of work, is sometimes just away somewhere. It is an uncertain, ever-shifting family environ and her mother is unhappy in its rough and wild spaces. This is a story of bush children growing up in 1940s rural poverty. The family moves often, there is constant upheaval and no safe haven from the misery of it all. But on the farm of her Grandfather Billy Kyle the child finds a brief sanctuary from the insecurity of her parent's unhappiness. And it is her young aunts with their generous hearts, the steady support of grandparents and friends who provide the tiny pieces of warmth, laughter and hope to leaven the bitterness and hurt of an unhappy family life. Noeline had to trawl through family histories, school records, newspaper reports, oral histories, museum data, and library and archival material to fill in some of the blank spaces left by a childhood lived so long ago; a childhood whose history was scattered, lost perhaps in the ghostly landscape scarcely able to be remembered at all. This childhood, her childhood, is partly a paean to the many myths, misunderstandings and misconceptions now clouding that past. It is also a story of how the history of childhood, any childhood, cannot be any more than the sum of its many wavering, ghostly and almost unknowable events

Cataloging source

ANL

Dewey number

920.720994