All The Green Year

Introduced by Michael McGirr ‘The year I remember best from those days is 1929. This was the year I turned fourteen and went into the eighth grade; the year too that Grandfather McDonald became peculiar and we moved to live with him in his house on the cliffs.’It was the end of an era; a year of ‘outlandish happenings’; a time when everything seemed to change for Charlie Reeve, a daydreaming lad growing up in a small town on the Mornington Peninsula. His teacher and dad are giving him a hard time, his neighbour Squid keeps getting him into trouble, and his best mate Johnno is busy seeing a girl-which leads Charlie to a nasty fight with Big Simmons. First published in 1965, and subsequently made into a popular ABC TV series, All the Green Year is the story of a boy’s journey towards adulthood-‘not only the humour of it but its drama and pain’, as the 96-year-old Don Charlwood writes in his revised afterword. www.textclassics.com.au

Don Charlwood was born in Melbourne in 1915 and grew up in Frankston. He joined the RAAF in 1940, and his wartime experience and subsequent career in air-traffic control took him throughout Australia, and to New Guinea, the United Kingdom and Canada. Among Don’s many books are his acclaimed debut, No Moon Tonight (1956), an account of his time with Bomber Command, and a two-volume autobiography.

Don was made a Member of the Order of Australia for services to literature in 1992. He died in June 2012, shortly before the Text Classic edition of All the Green Year was published.