It still amazes me what they allowed us to do without their supervision or help while remaining deeply loving parents. Climb trees from the age of four or five? No problems. Drive the tractor from the age of eight or nine? Good luck to you. Haul on the hoist to pull the half-ton bins filled with oranges off the trailer? Yes. Take your bike out on the Pacific Highway and ride to school? Okay, but just be careful…

Peter FitzSimons’s account of growing up, one of six children on a farm on the rural outskirts of Sydney in the 1960s, is first and foremost a tribute to family. But it is also a salute to times and generations past, when praise was understated but love unstinting, when work was hard and values clear, when people stood by each other in adversity.

Witty, tender and wise, A Simpler Time is told with good humour and enormous self-deprecation. They say if you had a happy childhood you remember the sun shining… whereas if you had an unhappy childhood you remember wet Wednesday afternoons, trudging home from school. When I look back on my life in that familyI remember the sun shining.

Peter FitzSimons is a journalist with the Sydney Morning Herald and Sun-Herald. He is the author of nearly twenty books – including Tobruk and biographies of Nancy Wake, Kim Beazley, Nene King, Nick Farr-Jones, Steve Waugh and John Eales – and was Australia’s bestselling non-fiction writer in 2001 and 2004.

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