The Winter Sparrows: Growing Up in Scotland and Australia

by Mary Rose Liverani

(From the inside cover)
A girl grew up in the slums of Glasgow and, at adolescence, her family migrated to a steel town in Australia. The story is not unusual but its author, Mary Rose Liverani, is.
She was the eldest of seven children. She likens them and her parents - and the poor among whom they lived - to a colony of winter sparrows who live from day to day and hand to mouth, spending all they could get and giving no thought to the morrow. The story begins in Plantation, a dockside area of Glasgow whose tenements once provided shipyards along the Clyde with unlimited supplies of labour. Mary's family left Plantation just before the slum reclamation schemes, exchanging it for an industrial area on the south coast of New South Wales, a typical Australian town. After a carefree interlude in a migrant hostel, she was faced with the silent hostility of an Australian suburb.
Mary Rose Liverani records with the candid vision of a child, describing so that others may also see and hear. We relive her experiences not only through her eyes but through her ears, her unusually perceptive mind and the magic of her imagination. Her total recall has enabled her to present the story of her childhood with the critical mind of an adult and the imagery of a poet.

432 pages, Kindle Edition

First published November 1, 1977

Reviews

[Barbara Greaves]

I really enjoyed this book. A good socio historical account of life in Scotland and Australia