I think my favourite Stead so far. Stead, in my opinion, is easily one of the greatest authors of the 20th century. She is certainly mine. I've now read The Man Who Loved Children, Seven Poor Men of Sydney, The Beauties and Furies, and For Love Alone. All 5 stars. She talked about things everyone else was too much of dog turd to talk about. On to House of All Nations. ( )

As you can see from the lyrical opening lines from her first novel, Seven Poor Men of Sydney, Christina Stead had vivid memories of her favourite places in Sydney, even though she had fled Australian parochialism some years before her final revision of the novel for publication in 1934. But although she came from a middle-class background, she also had vivid memories of the deprivation she had witnessed, and the first chapter paints a poignant picture of childhood poverty with her depiction of the childhood friend of her central character, Michael Baguenault:

Annie Prendergast lived with her family in part of the house. The little girl was thin, with black eyes and hair. She scratched her head and body all the time, and always smelled of ingrained dirt. In the corners of the house bats flew, swallows dropped mud and dung from every beam, and from all the cracks of the great whitewashed stones at the back ran cockroaches, beetles and rats. Cockchafer beetles, cicadas and mosquitoes shouted loudly in summer evenings in the tall trees; large spiders hung in the outhouses, and fearsome-looking, but innocent crickets and slaters dwelt under the bits of wood and sheets of corrugated iron fallen off the roof into the grass. The house attracted Michael and the other children with the same charm as a stagnant gutter. (p.4)

These children would be labelled ‘free-range children’ by the disapproving helicopter parents of our time, for they were free to roam around the harbour and to mingle with the fishermen and other working men. Stead does paint a negative portrait of their parents – not as neglectful – but rather as irrelevant. By the time Michael is a teenager he has with considerable hostility rejected his mother’s pious Catholicism, and seems relieved to discover that the man who brought him up is not his father after all. It is his presumed biological father who has lifted the family into middle-class respectability by leaving them a substantial legacy, which enables the two older girls to take up university scholarships, and for Michael and his sister to continue their secondary education.

To read the rest of my review please visit https://anzlitlovers.com/2016/11/09/seven-poor-men-of-sydney-by-christina-stead/ ( )