Ballina Boy

The water was as smooth as glass, and with a hint of diesel oil on the surface I could see all the colours of the rainbow we were not there just to catch fish but to dream.
This is the story of my childhood in Ballina in the 1950s. Packed with adventure on the bustling Richmond River; filled with fascination for my fathers medical practice, despite its intrusion into our family life; and enriched by his enquiring, scholarly mind, these years offered a way of life that I loved, and that exists no longer.



Book Review:


Roger KA Allen has written a beautiful and fascinating memoir about his family and childhood growing up in Australia in the 1950s. The son of a unique country doctor and a nurse, Allen touchingly chronicles his life in Australia from the time that his mother was pregnant with him to his ninth birthday. He describes how his fathers restlessness drove us into the wilderness like the Israelites in search of that promise of a land of milk and honey, which his family found in Ballina, New South Wales, where his father bought a local doctors practice.


The authors observations and accounts are very telling of the place and time that he grew up, from the descriptions surrounding his fathers medical practice to the medical profession in general, and the practice of frontal lobotomy or the horrors of shock therapy, to the introduction of television which had most Australians more educated about American culture and politics than their own. Allen also brings to light the similarities between the way the Australians and Americans treated the real first settlers to both those countries, recounting the history of racism and atrocities against the Aboriginal people, and the imaginary games of Explorers versus Aboriginals and Cowboys and Indians.