""As we started to round the corner I turned and looked back and waved a fond farewell, not only to my mother, but also to my childhood, as I began the first day of the rest of my life.""

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This memoir recounts the humour and tragedy in the lives of the people who lived in one small neighbourhood of Broken Hill, an isolated mining community in Far Western New South Wales during the nineteen forties and fifties.

As seen through the eyes of the author, the third child in a working-class family, it tells of a unique childhood, a wonderland, an amazing place where inventiveness more than compensated for the lack of material possessions.

There is a procession of characters, all with stories of their own, sometimes poignant, often amusing, as we travel with the writer from earliest memories until the day when she leaves childhood behind to begin her working life.