Hear the Train Blow: Patsy Adam Smith's Classic Autobiography of Growing Up in the Bush

by Patsy Adam-Smith

The true story of a remarkable young girl growing up in the bush during the Great Depression.

Patricia Jean Smith and her sister, Miss Mickie, grew up as railway children, their parents a station-mistress and a fettler. The catalogue of towns they lived in reverberates with the once-familiar clatter of metal and steam, but it was the tiny one-pub town of Waaia, in the centre of Victoria's wheat-rich Goulburn Valley, that kept drawing them back.

These were days of yabbying and rabbiting, of bush girls riding bareback on wilful ponies, and of the tin-lizzies that transformed the Mallee forever. It was a time for learning, for devouring books and for satisfying a powerful thirst for knowledge. And then it was a time for war.

Hear the Train Blow tells of Patsy Adam-Smith's classic upbringing during the Great Depression. It is a celebration of the ordinary people of Australia, and of a life that no longer exists.

Genres: Nonfiction, Australia

180 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1981

Reviews

[Ghyslaine · Rating 4 out of 5]

Loved this book on the pioneering days in Australia. A bit like 'little house on the prairie'.

[Craig · Rating 5 out of 5]

I loved this book when I first read it in the late 1970s.

Bless my mum, she knew this, and went to a book shop in the small Victorian country town where we lived when Patsy gave a reading of another book. I was in school at the time I think. Mum got her to sign a hard copy edition of this book for me. That was 1983 and I still have it!

[Bev Martin · Rating 5 out of 5]

A beautiful story of the unsung heroes of the bush during the depression. Funny and sad but also uplifting to read about those amazingly gentle but hard working men and women. How much we can learn from their stories. I would like my grandchildren to read this book as they get older.

[Angela Incigneri · Rating 5 out of 5]

Great book.. Lots of fun.

[Greg Robinson · Rating 5 out of 5]

superb Australian story of a childhood spent exploring and experiencing the wilds of Tasmania; very accessible to anyone , including non-Australians; some lovely sociological comment on human nature

[Pauline Leister · Rating 5 out of 5]

What a wonderful read of times past.

For anyone at all interested in the heritage of our past, this book is a must. How sad that the endeavours portrayed here could have been forgotten. Patsy Adam Smith has surely brought back to life the ghosts of time as no other historian has been capable. BRAVO.

[Paul Elias · Rating 5 out of 5]

Moving, modest and kind.

It's a great look at a time long gone by about a spirit of grit that always seems greater in the generations before. A wonderful collection of tales of the tracks.