In 1940, a seventeen year old girl Carys Harding Browne comes of age in Adelaide, Australia. At this time young clever men meet together at St, Mark's University College to share their love of poetry. By December 1940, St. Marks is leased to the Royal Australian Airforce as an embarkation depot. The Second World War is in earnest. This story is about young people growing up and falling in love against the backdrop of war where dances, friendship and the arts become a consolation in a fragile and uncertain time. It is, above all, the diary of a young girl finding herself amidst the impact of war.
This is a literary time capsule, a fastidious, vivid and shameless record of two pivotal years in Adelaide's history. Carys was part of a fast set which drank sherry, danced until dawn, fell in and out of love, read the latest books, saw all the shows, frolicked in the parklands and loved to thrill-seek. Some among this decadent generation were to become famous names. Pre-war, theirs was an antipodean Scott Fitzgerald life; their wild joie de vivre being piqued as the young poets and promising university students signed up and left to fight, several soon to die. Carys was too unruly to be given her dream job as a journalist but, as this wonderful book reveals, she was a very gifted diarist. — Samela Harris
