Bøger af Gail Hennessy

You know us. We are your cousin Alice, who tells the story of Nanna's funeral; of how all the cars followed Uncle George in the wrong direction, while a priest stood by the grave, waiting to conduct the burial. We are your dad, who you visit on warm summer nights, and he talks about the old days; when he met mum; when he worked in the cane fields. We are the migrant family next door, who laugh till they cry, telling of how, when they arrived in the fifties, they went to the milk bar for a gelati. The owner just kept saying "Gilleti" and offering them razor blades. We are the Vietnamese mother who tells you one day how she came to Australia. She quietly talks of three weeks at sea in a small boat, crammed in with twenty others, knees to chest, cold, wet and hungry. We are anyone who has lived in Australia. Often, our stories will be your stories; but some will be strange, different; some will be funny and others will bring tears. We are the story tellers who started with memories that turned into stories. We wrote them down, and learned the frustration when the words wouldn't come; and experienced that magical moment when the words took over, and the story wrote itself. We became authors. Now here we are. These are our stories; our country's living history.

Earthquake, a National Disaster Area and a volcano are all here. Along with friendships, partings, love and estrangement-the gamut of the human experience.We meet an indigenous family fighting to learn the truth about a loved one's death while serving his country. A son remembers a war-weary father who marched the Kokoda Trail, and a mother shares the joy of her three children. We pay tribute to the Stolen Generation and warriors defending the gentle giants of the sea-our whales. We share the love of a wife requesting her husband's surgeon to take care of her lover's heart and a family's devotion to a disabled son, with a unique gift for poetry, and deep insights into life.We read about the innocent joys of childhood, the love of grandparents and the extended family. So, here we are to share the kitchen pots, the tools of trade, the building of homes, living with hardship and the experience of integrating with other cultures. We hope that you will enjoy these stories and the journey back along memory lane, and realise that we are all a part of life's 'living history'.