ie They are NOT coming from overseas !!
AMY'S CHILDREN
- By Olga Masters -
Author Portrait on the back cover
ISBN: 0702220108
Publisher: University of Queensland Press, St Lucia, Queensland
Published: 1987
Binding: HARDcover with Dustjacket 240 pages
Condition: UNread & displayed condition! HERE in MELBOURNE! A retired display
copy as illustrated!
Edition: FIRST EDITION: 1st printing 1987
TIGHT, SCARCE HARDCOVER WITH DUSTJACKET ~ IN MELBOURNE ...
WHY do ebayers buy from US?
Because you KNOW what you're getting. My close up photos are of the actual item!!
Remains UNread - it was the display copy instore . It is Tight - neat, no inscriptions or marks within. Appears as in my photos - this is the exact copy!! A nicely preserved copy - superb!
No discernible shelf wear, the interior is tight and spotlessly clean with 240 pages. THIS copy is the FIRST EDITION: first printing from 1987 - the Australian publishing by University of Queensland Press, St Lucia, Queensland.
SCARCE title - this is an UNread copy!!
In original pastel blue cloth boards HARDcover binding, in publisher's dustjacket illustrated with artwork by Cynthia Breusch. which are in excellent condition.
(Stored with 2024!)
Measures approx. 8¾ x 5¾ inches or 23 x 14cms
SYNOPSIS ....
Unable to cope with the burdens of motherhood and poverty, twenty-one-year-old Amy Fowler leaves her Outback village for Sydney, where she reconstructs her life until the past returns in the form of her eldest daughter who comes to live with her.
Abandoned by her feckless husband during the Depression, Amy decides to leave her country town—and her three infant children—and try her luck in the city.
About the Author
Olga Masters née Lawler (28 May 1919 – 27 September 1986) was an Australian journalist, novelist and short story writer.
Masters wrote as a journalist for most of her life, and supplemented the family income by writing for local newspapers in the towns she lived in with her husband. On their return to Sydney, she wrote for papers such as The Manly Daily and The Sydney Morning Herald.
While she wanted to write fiction from an early age, she was not published as a writer of fiction until the late 1970s. During this decade she wrote several radio plays, receiving many rejections, but on 29 April 1977, her radio play The Penny Ha-penny Stamp was broadcast. However with the publication of her short story, Call me Pinkie, in The Sydney Morning Herald in 1978, she moved from writing drama to prose fiction. Between 1979 and 1980, she won nine awards for her short stories. She wrote fiction full-time from 1982, after the publication of The Home Girls.
Due to her late start and her relatively early death, Masters' published output is small but her impact was disproportionate in that her style and writings about writing inspired many others to take up the craft.
Very Interesting read!
Reviews
"The women whose small lives are chronicles here might be described as protofeminists . . . each is absorbed in making her own way in the world. . . . Superb."— Kirkus
5 STARS!! ... Abandoned by her feckless husband during the Depression, Amy decides to leave her country town — and her three infant children—and try her luck in the city.
"The women whose small lives are chronicles here might be described as protofeminists . . . each is absorbed in making her own way in the world. . . . Superb."— Kirkus
Abandoned by her feckless husband during the Depression, Amy decides to leave her country town—and her three infant children—and try her luck in the city.
HARD TO FIND a copy of this book .... It’s long out of print and there are only a few secondhand ones available online. That’s a shame, because Amy’s Children is said perhaps to be Olga Master’s finest work, and I enjoyed it very much.
It’s not experimental writing: Amy’s Children is a tale of an ordinary woman living a life that seems extraordinary in this day and age. Like her character, Olga Masters (1919-1986) married young, and she had seven children (all of whom went on to have distinguished careers, especially Chris Masters of Four Corners fame). As for so many a woman before her and since, motherhood limited her opportunities for writing till she was middle aged. There was some minor journalism and a successful radio play, but it was not until she won a prize for a short story that she began writing fiction, and her first novel The Home Girls was published in 1982 and won the National Book Award.
Amy’s Children was her third and last novel. It tells the story of Amy Fowler who grew up in poverty during the Great Depression, revealing a way of life that is hard to imagine now. Its opening lines are stark, and compelling:
Ted Fowler left his wife Amy and the children when the youngest, another girl, was a few weeks old.
The infant was sickly. The Great Depression was in a much more robust state. Ted told Amy he was going to walk south to Eden where there was reported to be work on fishing boats.
Ted and Amy had been married for only three years.
The first child was born three months after the wedding. Eighteen months later there was another and fifteen months after that a third. (p1)
At 20, Amy leaves these three children in the reluctant care of her mother and goes to Sydney. She starts out at her Aunt Daphne’s but, fiercely independent, she soon finds a place of her own – cannily renting out the upper floor to naive elderly sisters displaced from the family home by a brother’s marriage. The Misses Wheatley bring their own furniture – but Amy has none, and the story over ensuing years is punctuated by the gradual acquisition of small bits and pieces: a bed, a table, and on one triumphant day, a desk for her daughter Kathleen who eventually joins her in Sydney because there is no high school in Diggers Rest.
It is Amy’s quest to make a life of dignity out of her situation, and from the start she told her employers nothing about her children. When Kathleen turns up, she (remarkably) acquiesces in the charade that they are sisters. Together they go courting father and son, but Masters doesn’t offer a fairy tale ending. It’s poignant, and ultimately truthful instead.
While the plot is engaging, there’s no great drama except the drama of ordinary life. For me, it’s the little details in Amy’s Children which make it so interesting to read. Schoolchildren watch Daphne’s son John, a bricklayer, with admiration because ‘it never comes out crooked’ (p64) and his handyman skills make small additions to Amy’s meagre comforts on and off throughout the story. The attention to dress includes descriptions of Amy’s thrifty sewing skills, creatively altering the seconds she buys from the factory where she works. Collars, cuffs, belts, pleats, shoes neatly repaired – a reader can almost see Amy stepping out as she walks to work, and her sense of personal pride in her hard-won smart appearance is touching. In the days when people like her were unwelcome in banks, she keeps her small savings in her handbag -indicative of a time when assaults on women were rare. Still, it’s quite clear that all her scrimping and saving doesn’t allow for any unforeseen disasters, and Kathleen’s intrusion into her private space impacts severely on Amy’s finances.
Despite the privations of Sydney, life there as an independent woman is preferable to the overcrowding back at Diggers Creek. There’s pride in their routine use of a tablecloth because it symbolises freedom from drudgery and squalor:
Kathleen shook the tablecloth free of crumbs and put it back for breakfast with the salt and pepper shakers in the centre, alongside the cruet and sugar bowl. She felt a sense of pleasure when this was done. At home in Diggers Creek, the table was used after meals for May’s ironing, Gus’s farm catalogues, spread out to get the best of the lamplight, and sometimes a game of cards, played with a greasy pack… (p115)
It is this ability to compress a wealth of images and a long-forgotten way of life into short passages that distinguishes Masters’ fiction. I’m looking forward to finding more of her work!
WONDERFUL … The characters and aspects of the plot are so relatable to Australian women. I picked this book off a shelf at a school where I was working because I was intrigued by the cover and blurb. So glad I did because it is now one of my favourite go - to easy reads.
Olga Masters has a coherent writing style and a beautiful gift for story telling. I highly recommend this book.
Loved it! …. I picked this up and didn't put it down until I was done. I loved it. If you like the spare, penetrating style of Pearl S. Buck and haven't yet read Olga Masters you are in for a treat.
A simple story but told so well. …. Starts in the 1930s in the South Coast of NSW. Amy is pregnant at 17, marries and quickly has 3 girls. The husband runs off. She leaves her children with her mother and goes to Sydney to find work.
She spends her time buying things for her residence and clothes for herself. She rarely thinks about her children. When her eldest child comes to live with her to go to High School she wants her to tell everyone they are sisters. They become more like friends and even go on double dates.
So she is selfish and a manipulative - yet I felt very emphatic towards her. Interesting how the author is able to exact this feeling.
And life in Sydney post-depression, during WWII and afterwards is beautifully depicted. The good old days were not very golden - low pay, long hours, no work for married women, hunger and deprivation.
I couldn't put this down, … and read it in a day! A great commentary on women's lives, and their inner worlds.
Australia at the end of the Depression … This is a story set at the end of the Depression and into WWII, set in rural NSW and in Sydney. It tells of Amy, who after desertion by her husband leaves her with 3 small children, decides to travel alone to Sydney to make her way. Reunion with her children occurs after 10 years and not by her choice. A view of a very different Australia to the one we now inhabit, without social support for single mothers and with a poverty we have all but forgotten.
Marvellous Reading!
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