Text Classics: All the Green Year

Introduction 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.