Bernard Smith is a living legend. Now aged 88, the author of Place, Taste and Tradition and European Vision and the South Pacific is still writing about Australian art, as the review of his latest book on the previous page shows. As part of its ongoing commitment to re-releasing classic Australian titles UQP has revived Smith’s 1984 autobiography, which tells of his life until 1940. Fostered out at as a baby to the kindly Mum Keen, Smith enjoyed a poor but loving upbringing in a house in Sydney’s inner-west crowded with an ever-revolving array of state wards, foster children and, among it all, Mum Keen’s own family. While the book centres around ‘the lucky bastard’ Smith, he also tells the story of all his ‘families’—his birth mother’s, birth father’s, the Keens and many others they all come into contact with. While this material is all important social history, at times it does go off into some long diversions, especially in the book’s first third, where as much time is spent in 19th century Ireland as in 20th century Sydney. As Smith grows up and discovers the joys and frustrations of education and then the bohemian side of the 1930s—art, sex and the Communist Party—the narrative recovers its drive.

Tim Coronel is AB&P’s assistant editor

This review from Australian Bookseller & Publisher magazine is reproduced by kind permission of Thorpe-Bowker, a division of R R Bowker LLC. © Copyright 2004, Thorpe-Bowker