A Simpler Time

A Simpler Time

Australia's favourite biographer magnificently captures 1960s Australia in an affectionate and hilarious tribute to his childhood.

It still amazes me what they allowed us to do without their supervision or help while remaining deeply loving parents. Climb trees from the age of four or five? No problems. Drive the tractor from the age of eight or nine? Good luck to you. Haul on the hoist to pull the half-ton bins filled with oranges off the trailer? Yes. Take your bike out on the Pacific Highway and ride to school? Just be careful, but okay . . .

Peter FitzSimons's account of growing up, one of six children on a farm on the rural outskirts of Sydney in the 1960s, is first and foremost a tribute to family. But it is also a salute to times and generations past, when praise was understated but love unstinting, when work was hard and values clear, when people stood by each other in adversity.

Witty, tender and wise, A Simpler Time is told with good humour and enormous self-deprecation. Peter comments, 'They say if you had a happy childhood you remember the sun shining...whereas if you had an unhappy childhood you remember wet Wednesday afternoons, trudging home from school. When I look back on my life in that family...I remember the sun shining'.

Peter Fitzsimons is a journalist with the Sydney Morning Herald and Sun-Herald and has interviewed everyone from President George Bush Snr to Sir Edmund Hillary to every Australian Prime Minister since Gough Whitlam. He is also a popular after-dinner speaker and the only Wallaby sent from the field against the All Blacks - unjustly, he swears. Peter is the author of twenty-one books - including biographies of Nancy Wake, Kim Beazley, Nick Farr-Jones, Steve Waugh, Les Darcy, John Eales and Charles Kingsford Smith - and was Australia's bestselling non-fiction writer in 2001 and 2004. He is the author of the number-one best-selling military history books Kokoda and Tobruk. He lives in Sydney with his wife Lisa Wilkinson and their three children.

A Simpler Time
Harper Collins Australia
Author: Peter FitzSimons
ISBN: 9780732288044
Price: $35.00

Interview with Peter Fitzsimons

Tell us a little bit about A Simpler Time and the inspiration behind the book:

Peter Fitzsimons: I am a professional biographer, I write other peoples biographies, I have done Nancy Wake, Kim Beazley, Nick Farr-Jones, The White Mouse, Steve Waugh, people like that. A mate of mine, Matt Larsen, was always encouraged me to write my own stories, he would say "you spend all this time writing other peoples stories, why don't you write something about your own story?" About ten years ago I replied by saying "if I did it I know the title I would use, it would be 'A Simpler Time'", the idea being growing up in regional Australia in the 1960's was a very simple time, the world wasn't the affected by issues and it was all fairly calm. I told Matt the title and then forgot about it, he then kept coming back to me and asking "have you done it yet, are you going to start it yet?" He died in April, I'm very upset that he didn't live to see it.

The idea was to try to encapsulate my childhood and not only my childhood but the childhood that many of us had, in the 1960's. I grew up the youngest of seven children, I lost one brother before I was born, but youngest of seven growing up on a farm, one of the themes and something Mum and Dad always said was "you're big and ugly enough to do it yourself". We had 60 acres of farmland to ramble in and thousands of acres of state forest to ramble in. My brothers and sisters would ride their bikes on the Pacific highway out to school, by the time I got to school it was too busy, so mum would drive us, but that was a recurring theme.

The other thing is I lived on a rural road, with about four or five houses on it and one of the things I warmed to in the book was just the fabulous array of characters, these characters that come and go into our lives. One of them was a woman called Mrs Miles who was basically mad, she was a very good worker but she was always swearing, in my presence and my parent's presence, she would hear voices and would talk or shout back at them. I grew up around people like that and my parents would say "there are all types of the world, she is different to the usual, but that's not her fault, just live with it" and we did, to the point that I would never hear her swearing, it was just what Mrs Miles did. My mother would always pick up hitchhikers, there was no such thing as stranger-danger, I wasn't aware of the concept of stranger-danger. I often think that in the 21st century we have gone too far, towards being helicopter-parents, always hovering around our children asking "can we help you?" Kids have to make mistakes on their own.


Was it easy remembering your childhood?

Peter Fitzsimons: It was interesting, my brothers and sisters are all very close and in many ways I had to get it past them. In the sense of we all have distant memories of the same event and because it is such a personal book and so much about Mum and Dad, I was constantly going to my siblings asking "do you remember it like this?"


Do you think children are missing out these days not being able to ride their bikes on highways or drive tractors?

Peter Fitzsimons: Yes, I do. I frankly do. There are dangers, no mistake but my wife and I, Lisa Wilkinson, we have three kids and I don't want them to be paranoid about the world. My mother raised me, and all of us, to think the world is a good place, filled with good people and until you have reason to suspect otherwise you can believe in the goodness of people.

You go from being a child to an adult through the joys of rambling, of falling over and having adventures. I grew up in a place were there was more places to have an adventure than you can poke a stick at.

The place I grew up, the homestead, the farm, is still there, the shed is still there. We own it and we will always own it, Mum and Dad are buried there. It is a very important ground for us.


Do you think you're more protective of your children than your parents were of you?

Peter Fitzsimons: A bit, but I'm probably a lot less than other parents, because that is the way I was raised. My wife and I frequently have discussions about how my lack of security conciseness, with locking doors; I wasn't raised like that.