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A Fortunate Life: A. B. Facey

A Penguin Book

ISBN: 0 670 80307 3

Published by: Penguin Books Australia

Printed in Australia by: The Dominion Press-Hedges & Bell

Format: glossy pictorial softcover

Total print-bearing Pages: estimated 334 pages (preliminary section page [6 unnumbered pages] + 333 numbered pages [text] + 6 unnumbered pages [Afterword] + 3 unnumbered pages (synopsis 2 other Penguin titles)

Size: approx. 11.0cm x 18.2cm x 1.9cm

Mass: approx. 190g

Special Attributes: First published in 1981 by Fremantle Arts Centre Press; first published by Penguin Books Australia Ltd 1981; stated this revised condition published by Penguin Group (Australia) 2005; glossy pictorial softcover; glued binding/ covering; quality cream coloured/ thin / slightly translucent papers; comprises 6 Parts (successive time periods) containing a total of 63 chapters; each Part opens with a title page with a drawing on the reverse face; 3 location maps (to scale); opening section comprises [1] single black-and-white photographic portrait (1914) [2] chapter 1 (A Prelude); closing section comprises [1] chapter 68 (Grinding To A Halt) [2] Afterword by Jan Carter [3] single black-and-white photographic portrait (1981); no index

Marked (adhesive retailer label – frontcover) as “THE TOP 101” – “DYMOCKS BOOK LOVERS’ BEST”

Marked (backcover) as Autobiography

Marked (adhesive retailer label – backcover) as $26.95

Condition: Used (generally very good condition); uncreased spine; appears little read; minor to moderate age tanning discolouration free leaf edges – primarily upper free leaf edges; minor (faint) peripheral age tanning (all of textbody) upper page margin area; minimal cover wear; general rubbing front and backcover with [1] associated reduction in and/or loss of glossy finish [2] minor superficial scoring due to contact with grit or similar; rubbing wear/ indentation cover edges (front and backcover) with reflection of printlayer bottom of spine; turning/ indentation lower free corner area frontcover; indentation/ curling upper free corner frontcover; creasing indentation upper and lower free corner backcover; adhesive retailer promotional label lateral margin area frontcover; adhesive retailer price label backcover (overlying barcode block); white plastic identity plate affixed vertically to inner backcover; tight binding

Text: appears little read; minor to moderate age tanning discolouration free leaf edges – primarily upper free leaf edges; minor (faint) peripheral age tanning (all of textbody) upper page margin area – textbody is otherwise sound and clean, free of previous owner underlining and highlighting, and no annotation /inscription of any kind noticed

Softcover: uncreased spine; minimal cover wear; general rubbing front and backcover with [1] associated reduction in and/or loss of glossy finish [2] minor superficial scoring due to contact with grit or similar; rubbing wear/ indentation cover edges (front and backcover) with reflection of printlayer bottom of spine; turning/ indentation lower free corner area frontcover; indentation/ curling upper free corner frontcover; creasing indentation upper and lower free corner backcover; adhesive retailer promotional label lateral margin area frontcover; adhesive retailer price label backcover (overlying barcode block); white plastic identity plate affixed vertically to inner backcover; tight binding

Description: Biographical. Anecdotal. According to the title “A Fortunate Life.” An entry on the bookdepository internet website stated “A true classic of Australian literature, Facey's simply penned story offers a unique window onto the history of Australian life through the greater part of the twentieth century – the extraordinary journey of an ordinary man.”

“The story has been told so often it has taken on an air of myth. One day in the early 1970s, a retired pig and poultry farmer from Western Australia sat down at his kitchen table. While his wife made jam and encouraging noises, he began filling exercise books with episodes from his past. These tales, polished verbally over decades, were intended for his children and grandchildren to read and pass along.”

According to the frontcover “The Australian Classic Over 750,000 Copies Sold.”

According to the backcover, “In Albert Facey’s story we find a story of Australia. Born in 1894, Facey lived the rough frontier life of a sheep farmer, survived the gore of Gallipoli, traised a family through the Depression, and spent sixty years with his beloved wife, Evelyn. Despite enduring hardships we can barely imagine today, Facey always saw his life as a ‘fortunate’ one.”

“A true classic of Australian literature, his simply written autobiography is an inspiration. It is the story of a life lived to the full – the extraordinary journey of an ordinary man.”

According to the rear dustcover extension of another edition, “Albert Facey was born in 1894 and grew up on the Kalgoorlie goldfields and in the wheat-belt of Western Australia. His father died before he was two and he was deserted by his mother soon afterwards. He was looked after by his grandmother until he was eight years old, when he went out to work.”

“His many jobs included droving, hammering spikes on the railway line from Merredin to Wickepin and boxing in a travelling troupe. He was in the Eleventh Battalion at the Gallipoli landing; after the war, he became a farmer under the Soldier Settlement Scheme but was forced off the land during the Depression. He joined the tramways and was active in the Tramways Union.”

“Albert Facey, who had no formal education, taught himself to read and write. He made the first notes of his life soon after World War I, and filled notebooks with his accounts of his experiences. Finally, on his children’s urging, he submitted , the hand-written manuscript to the Fremantle Arts Centre Press who published it in 1981.”

“Albert Facey died in 1982 in Perth, nine months after ‘A Fortunate Life’ was first published.”

An extract of a review attributed to Geoffrey Dutton and cited on the frontcover of another edition, states “a classic in Australian writing … unforgettable.”

An extract of a review attributed to ‘Adelaide Advertiser’ cited on the backcover of another edition, states “I am stunned by the horror this man endured in his childhood. I am humbled by his acceptance of good and bad … This is an extraordinary and moving book.”

An extract of a review attributed to the ‘Age’ on the backcover of another edition, states “The Life of Bert Facey is a microcosm of the earlier life of this country, with those mighty totems of ours – the Bush and the War – looming monolithically over every thing else .”

An entry on the fremantlepress.com.au states, in part, “Born in 1894 and first sent to work at the age of eight, Facey lived the rough frontier life of a labourer and farmer and jackaroo, becoming lost and then rescued by Indigenous trackers, then gaining a hard-won literacy, surviving Gallipoli, raising a family through the Depression, losing a son in the Second World War, and meeting his beloved Evelyn with whom he shared nearly 60 years of marriage.”

“Despite enduring unimaginable hardships, Facey always saw his life as a fortunate one.”

“A true classic of Australian literature, Facey’s simply penned story offers a unique window onto the history of Australian life through the greater part of the twentieth century – the extraordinary journey of an ordinary man.”

“PRAISE FOR THE BOOK”

“‘[A] plain, unembellished, utterly sincere and unself-pitying account of the privations of childhood and youth.’ Courier Mail”

“‘[An] extremely powerful description of Gallipoli.’ Australian Book Review”

“‘This is the sort of book that makes me feel comfortable and warm. It’s a companion and friend, much, much more than a collection of words … The charm of the chapters lies in the sincerity of the author, a man that one finds so easy to admire through his writing alone.’ Queensland Reviewers Collective”

A selection of reviews obtained on the internet follow the “Contents’ section of this description

Contents:

publishers’ comments on author and book (flyleaf)

frontispiece – black-and-white photograph author (1914)

dedication

publication details

table of Contents

PART 1

STARTING OUT 1894-1908

MANY PEOPLE HAD LITTLE FEELING OR SYMPATHY FOR THOSE IN NEED

chapters/ sections

1. A PRELUDE

2. THE JOURNEY BEGINS

3. ON THE GOLDFIELDS

location map: SOUTH-WEST OF WESTERN AUSTRALIA (to scale)

4. A LONG WALK

5. UNCLE’S SETTLEMENT

6. CAVE ROCK

7. A CHRISTMAS CELEBRATION

8. JOURNEY AT NIGHT

PART 2

BUSH SCHOOLING 1905-1908

‘I DIDN’T KNOW YOU. YOUR SWAG IS BIGGER THAN YOU ARE

chapters/ sections

9. A SNAKE BITE

10. TAKEN AGAIN

11. A NEW HOME

12. THE BOAR

13. KILLING THE PIG

14. MUM’S SNAKE

15. A PROPOSITION

16. A BITTER END

17. THE BIBBYS

18. AN EVENTFUL CHRISTMAS

19. MY WILD LIFE

20. THE CATTLE THIEF

21. POLICE WITNESS

22. GOODBYE

23. TRAVELLING HOME

24. ARRIVAL

25. MOTHER

PART 3

JOURNEY 1908-1909

IT WAS A FEELING OF WONDER – NOT LONELY, NOT AFRAID – A FEELING OF INDEPENDENCE

chapters/ sections

26. TRAVELLING NORTH

27. ROAD TO MULLEWA

28. ANOTHER CHRISTMAS

29. SIGNING ON

30. PREPARATION

location map: CATTLE DRIVE North-West of Western Australia (to scale)

31. THE RIDE NORTH

32. THE DRIVE BEGINS

33. LOST

34. DELIVERANCE

35. BACK TO WORK

36. THE DRIVE ENDS

PART 4

KNOCKING ABOUT 1909-1914

‘JUST CALL ME PUNCH’

chapters/ sections

37. CITY LIFE

38. BACK TO THE BUSH

39. SOLID ADVICE

40. RETURN

41. SETTLING IN

42. TAKING CHARGE

43. DINGO KILLER

44. KICKING AROUND

45. SOLIDARITY

46. PRIZE FIGHTER

47. MARKING TIME

48. MICKEY FLYNN’S BOXING TROUPE

PART 5

WAR 1914-1915

‘YOU BOYS DIDN’T SLEEP. YOU DIED.’

chapters/ sections

49. MILITARY TRAINING

50. THE MIDDLE EAST

51. BEFORE THE STORM

52. GALLIPOLI

53. THE FIRST DAYS

location map: GALLIPOLI (to scale)

54. IN THE TRENCHES

55. FIGHTING ON

56. THE BATTLE FOR LEANNE’S TRENCH

57. ANOTHER BIRTHDAY

PART 6

ANOTHER LIFE 1915-1916

AFTER OUR MARRIAGE MY LIFE BECAME SOMETHING WHICH WAS MUCH MORE THAN JUST ME

chapters/ sections

58. EVELYN GIBSON

59. WORK AND MARRIAGE

60. A STRIKE

61. ON THE TRAMS

62. SOLDIER SETTLER

63. GOOD AND BAD

64. DEPRESSION

65. RETURN TO THE CITY

66. ANOTHER WAR

67. POULTRY AND PIGS

68. GRINDING TO A HALT

AFTERWORD – Jan Carter

last page – black-and-white photograph author (1987)

publishers’ comments (backcover)

--------------

Some reviews obtained on the internet follow:

A reader review on a US (A.xxx.com) internet website states “Face To Face With Life's Dangers: As others have said, this IS a fascinating book, and really stands as the tale of the emerging nation of Australia told through one man's (early) life story. Bert Facey emerges from poverty stricken-childhood in western Australia, through loss and separation from his parents, to having to fend for himself from a very young age against cruel employers, wild animals, fate, and Australia's harsh environment. But Bert holds his nerve at every turn, spurred on by a strong personal sense of right and wrong, and an instinct to stay just the right side of danger. These raw materials are then invaluable to Bert when he finds himself dodging bullets on the beaches of Gallipoli, in a war that costs him the lives of two of his brothers. Injury and instinct combine again to throw him into the arms of his bride to be back home in Oz. The disappointment for the reader, though, is that having been entranced by Bert's story upto his marriage, he then skips over the next sixty-plus years in a few paragraphs, hopping through the emergence of his own family and further tribulations through the Depression, the Second World War, and the ongoing health legacies of his First World War experiences. As I said, it's a real shame that Facey does the opposite of what most autobiographers do, in speeding time up through his later life story, rather than slowing it down and spinning us a longer yarn. Despite this, Bert's message is clear – we all need good fortune in our lives, but we're all capable of shaping that good fortune ourselves.”

A reader review on a US (A.xxx.com) internet website states “A glimpse in to life in the Australian outback in the early 20th century, and to what people can do when determined to overcome: Although the writer always presents himself in a very favourable light and seems a little self righteous at times, the reader cannot but admire the tenacity of spirit that enabled him to overcome great adversity.”

“From being sent to work at the age of eight years, to being wounded in the first world war, losing his farm during the great depression and losing a son in the second world war, the writer remained cheerful and resolute and grateful for his lot”

“A great contrast with the attitudes of so many in our time.”

A review on the goodreads.com internet website attirbuted to Tim Bazzett, states: “A mesmerizing personal history of life in Australia's frontier west. Very highly recommended”

“I am a sucker for a well-told memoir, and I particularly love those by people I've never heard of. Well, I'd never heard of A.B. (Albert Barnett) Facey, but that's mostly because I don't live in Australia. Because in the past thirty-some years his memoir, A FORTUNATE LIFE, has taken on the status of a classic in that country. And here's another thing that intrigued me: having never gone to school, Facey was functionally illiterate until he was nearly twenty years old, and was over eighty when he began writing down his life story. I love it when old guys write their life stories, maybe because I was sixty when I wrote my first memoir.”

“Albert Facey's story of his life in frontier Western Australia was a fascinating, even mesmerizing one. Born into a large family in 1894, Facey's father died when he was only a few years old and his mother married again and left him (and other siblings) to be raised by his grandmother and an aunt and uncle. At eight he was literally "farmed out" to another family who abused and neglected him. Forced to do difficult farm labor and living in filth and rags, Facey learned early to be self-sufficient and to work his scrawny little butt off to survive. The family he'd been indentured to turned out to be one of criminals, cattle thieves and drunks. When he managed to escape that situation, Albert's subsequent jobs with other, kinder families, got gradually better, and by the time he was fourteen he was knowledgeable and tough enough to manage a farm by himself. He learned about wheat farming and working with all manner of stock - sheep, pigs, horses, poultry. As a teenager he was cook's helper driving over two thousand head of cattle for hundreds of miles to a railhead for sale. Along the way he became lost in the wilderness for a week following a stampede and would have starved had he not been found and rescued by friendly Aborigines. He drove spikes for a new railroad line for a time. He was also a professional pugilist with a traveling troupe of boxers, possessing a perfect left jab, and he never lost a fight.”

“In 1914 he volunteered for the army and was badly wounded at the infamous battle of Gallipoli, and was invalided out of the service with a disability pension. Shortly thereafter he married his wife, Evelyn - a marriage that produced several children and lasted fifty-nine years, until his wife's death in 1976. During that time Facey worked numerous jobs despite his war injuries, which often periodically landed him back in hospital, and endured the hardships of the Great Depression of the 1930s. Three of his sons enlisted in the army for service in WWII, and one of them was killed.”

“And hey, I'm not really giving anything away here. I'm only skimming the surface of Facey's life in the briefest kind of outline. Facey tells his story in the most straightforward manner, filled with fascinating details and anecdotes, with no trace of self-pity anywhere. And he is the most natural of storytellers, obviously a child of the oral tradition. What you are reading in ‘A FORTUNATE LIFE’ is history - history of the most personal and valuable sort. Because, for his time, Albert Facey was a kind of Everyman. And the reading world is very fortunate indeed that Albert Facey took the time, with the encouragement of his devoted wife, to set it all down for us. A.B. Facey died in 1982, nine months after his book was published. He was 87 years old.”

“This is simply one helluva good read. VERY highly recommended.”

---------------

A review attributed to Geordie Williamson given on the readingaustralia.com.au internet website states: “The story has been told so often it has taken on an air of myth. One day in the early 1970s, a retired pig and poultry farmer from Western Australia sat down at his kitchen table. While his wife made jam and encouraging noises, he began filling exercise books with episodes from his past. These tales, polished verbally over decades, were intended for his children and grandchildren to read and pass along.”

“That work was not completed for some years, by which time the man was elderly, his beloved wife passed away. When the finished manuscript was sent off to Freemantle Arts Centre Press with a request that it be prepared for vanity publication – an edition of just twenty copies – the publishers saw potential in the book and produced a commercial run instead. ‘A Fortunate Life’ by Albert Barnett Facey finally appeared in 1981.”

“‘Bert’ Facey was born in 1894, seven years before Federation and the birth of a modern Australian nation. His life closely mapped the drama of the early decades of the young country, in peacetime and in war. It was touched by adventure and tragedy, though it also contained moments of quietude, beauty and happiness. The manner of his telling combined rustic simplicity with stoic restraint. A sense of decency threaded through the narrative, just as a seam of precious metal folds through rock. Though it is not the work of an educated man, A Fortunate Life could easily have as its epigraph a line by the Roman Emperor and philosopher Marcus Aurelius: ‘Misfortune nobly born is good fortune.’”

“The phenomenon which grew from these modest beginnings has become part of the book’s history. By the time of Facey’s death in 1982, ‘A Fortunate Life’ had bought its author to national attention. He could scarcely have imagined, however, that three decades and three quarters of a million copies later the book would still be in print and regarded an Australian classic. If it remains fascinating today for its portrait of an ordinary bloke who lived through remarkable times, our enduring enthusiasm for it says something significant about us, too.”

“Because our responses to the book have grown complicated. Though it records one man’s existence and a singular existence at that, Bert Facey’s life has come to be read as a universal tale – an Everyman’s progress through the peaks and toughs of a stormy century. Our idea of him has been cut to fit neatly with our current patriotic requirements, most potently those associated with the Anzac legend.”

“Celebrated for the artless, yarn-like manner of its telling, ‘A Fortunate Life’ is nonetheless a skillful and often sophisticated ‘literary’ artifact. Examination of Facey’s manuscript has revealed that the published work, long once thought to have been reshaped by editorial intervention, was in fact mostly true to the author’s original words. Facey the self-taught writer and reader had more tricks up his sleeve than we were willing to give him credit for.”

“And the life described in its pages? While we have come to automatically regard Facey’s record as one that is archetypally ‘Australian’, the ongoing popularity of 'A Fortunate Life' may actually be evidence of how far we have moved from the reality it outlines. To contemporary readers – overwhelmingly urban-dwelling, oriented towards the wider world rather than the Australian inland, the digital future rather than the analog past – Facey’s frontier upbringing seems impossibly exotic. He strikes us as the member of a tribe whose ceremonies and laws are revered in principle but no longer observed in practice.”

“It is confusions like these that should return us to the book, to rescue the text from misreadings that have grown up around it and to hear Bert Facey’s testimony free from outside intervention. And what most of us will learn first on such an undertaking is the irony of the title: Facey’s life was anything but fortunate. Indeed his childhood as a poor and uneducated farm labourer was Dickensian in every respect save its dusty outback setting.”

“Son of a father who died when he was a small boy and a mother who remarried and then vanished from his life, Bert was taken in by his doughty and dependable grandmother. And yet circumstances soon obliged her to send him off to work. At the age of eight, he moved to a nearby farm in the frontier districts of the Western Australian wheat-belt, and there he was effectively enslaved and physically abused by his employers. He eventually escaped, but even the improved employment he found in the following years consisted of hard physical labour in often hostile conditions, much of it done for a pittance.”

“It’s worth noting how cleverly Facey’s controls the flow of incident in these early chapters, pushing the comical up against the plainly violent, the sentimental against the stoical: furnishing all the picaresque twists, eccentric characters and narrative vigour of a Victorian-era novelist. It is only when the narrative is undressed of action that we get some sense of the shape of his sadness and isolation:”

“On Sundays, when we didn’t work much, I would often go into the bush and watch the birds and they were lovely. In some ways they were like me – they had to fend for themselves as soon as the mother bird thought that they were old enough.”

“It is not the plain homily drawn from nature that catches the eye here; it is the word ‘much’ in relation to Sundays and work. That single syllable contains multitudes: all the other hours in his life which may not be devoted to family or education. The natural world is a kind of braille for the unlettered boy. Bert reads the landscape and its creatures as other children would read a book.”

“And this landscape is one that would seem alien to contemporary readers. Facey grows up at the very edge of settled agricultural country. It is his hands that fell the trees, burn the stumps, wire the fences, plough the earth and shoot the dingos that threaten livestock. It is a world in which the full dominion of white arrivals over the environment has yet to be achieved. Indeed, there are times when the whole enterprise seems to hang in the balance. The subjugation of wilderness which we take for granted, indeed decry from a position of suburban comfort, is not just a matter of profit during these years; it is the difference between survival and starvation. Even Facey’s love of birdlife is shaped by his knowledge of which species are a terror on the crops.”

“Of course, that battle very much includes that landscape’s original inhabitants. Though it goes unmentioned in the narrative, Facey is twelve years old when the Noongar people of his area are placed in a government reserve. The boy is raised on stories of black violence against whites and fears them. But when, in his mid-teens (having briefly moved back in with his mother and stepfather in Perth), Facey takes a job as a dogsbody on a droving run through Australia’s top end, it is the tribesmen and women of the region who rescue him after he is separated from the droving party during a storm.”

“That act of kindness forever alters the Facey’s attitude. And here, as in so many other aspects of his story, there is a sense of a moral compass having to find North by its own efforts. Facey has never attended school. What limited literacy he possessed has been cribbed from a few borrowed textbooks. It is hard to imagine a less ‘mediated’ understanding of the world, innocent of the political or ideological currents of the day. Whatever sense of justice he has is cobbled together from the harsh empiricism of his daily life: the work he undertakes, the animals he cares for or works beside, the men and women whose conduct decides their worth in his eyes.”

“There is one profound exception to this resolutely local education: World War I. Facey is in his early twenties at the outbreak of hostilities, working with a troupe of travelling boxers. He is quick on his feet but the fights are largely staged – acts of violence performed as light entertainment. What follows could not be more real. In January 1915 he enlists with the Australian Imperial Force and is soon shipped to the Middle East. There he serves at Gallipoli with the 11th Battalion until August, when he is diagnosed with ‘heart trouble’ and repatriated. This section, perhaps because it is the most dramatic in terms of incident, is the most devastating when relayed in Facey’s resolutely understated style. As an explanation of Australian ‘mateship’ it is difficult to top:”

“I think it would be true to say that all the men who were at Gallipoli wanted to stay with their comrades. It wasn’t that anyone wanted to be a hero, its just that we were very close after four months together under such terrible conditions. A sort of love and trust in one another developed in the trenches. It made us all very loyal to one another.”

“If there is a before and after in Facey’s life, the line should be drawn here. He loses two older brothers at Gallipoli, along with his health. The formerly vigorous, athletic, knockabout bloke returns shattered by his experience, though natural optimism and grit make up much of the deficit in animal robustness. In its quietly outraged account of the difficulties faced by returned servicemen, of their mistreatment at the hands of those who stayed behind as well as those in positions of political power, A Fortunate Life should be read alongside those other critiques of the conflict’s aftermath – George Johnston’s ‘My Brother Jack’ and Hal Porter’s ‘Watcher on the Cast-Iron Balcony’ – books whose questioning of the Anzac myth has been forgotten by a nation determined to celebrate the Great War’s unfolding centenary.”

“Like many others, Facey is politicised by the war. As a tram driver in Perth in the years immediately afterward, he becomes involved with the trade union movement and develops a more sophisticated sense of the bifurcation between the haves and have-nots in Australian society. At a time when suspicions of unionism are greater than ever before, and their power to collectively bargain largely eroded, it is worth revisiting the early years of the movement. In it, we recognise a purer form of the egalitarian impulse we still claim to possess.”

“Facey’s subsequent biography is quieter but it can still flare up on occasion. He loses a first family farm to the Depression and his eldest son to the Pacific theatre of the Second World War. And yet, of all these Job-like afflictions visited upon him, it is only early abandonment by a grasping mother seems to have left any trace of bitterness in Facey. At the tail end of a period of unprecedented national prosperity, domestic peace and material comfort it must be hard for contemporary readers to imagine how a man who suffered so much could view his life as blessed.”

“The relative weighting accorded to different parts of Facey’s life offers its own set of clues as to why this is the case. We know that the book’s editors cut material relating to Facey’s later years, however the author himself swiftly passes through the long decades following WWI, leaping family generations in a paragraph. And where his boyhood and youth during the early Twentieth century are recalled with photographic exactitude (a recall so unlikely that we must return to Facey’s skills as a novelist to explain how he ordered memory into memoir) later periods seem to fade into sepia vagueness.”

“Perhaps it is not only Gallipoli that should see as a line of biographical demarcation for Facey. The other signal moment in his life is the chance meeting with an attractive young domestic named Evelyn Gibson soon after his return to WA, in 1916. It was Evelyn who, in marrying Bert soon after, helped return the damaged returned solider to health. And even more importantly, it was Evelyn who rescued him from his orphan status.”

“It was the birthdays that no one remembered or even knew about that stuck in the young man’s memory – it was the emotional privation of loneliness that etched those hard years so cleanly onto the page. But with his wife, mother of his children and dedicatee of ‘A Fortunate Life’, Albert Facey was finally able to dissolve his solitude in some broader domestic collective. It was not that he no longer remembered the past; it was that he no longer needed to do so alone.”

Note on domestic postage using Australia Post

As the mass of the book means it will exceed 500g if the AP ‘Domestic letter (Large) with tracking’ card wallet was to be used and, given eBay’s insistence on tracking, then for conventional/ routine mailings, the AP Small satchel needs to be used

Any item packed in a Small satchel (standard service) should come to $10.90 all up – allowing for packaging (plastic sleeve and, if practicable, with bubble wrap and/ or cardboard support).

Alternatively (ie at buyer's buyer's selection/ request/ nomination) it could be sent

[1] express mail using an AP Express Post (Large) envelope (includes inner packaging) – $12.95c

[2] registered mail using an AP ‘TB2 Tough Bag Postpak’ plus the registered post label – $10.75

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