Growing Up and other Stories, by Anthony Hill. Illustrated by Melissa Strauss. Gininderra Press, Canberra, 1999, 155 pages. Out of Print. Available as an eBook.

The Stories   Introduction   What the Critics said

Growing Up is a collection of fourteen short stories exploring some of the joys and confusions of growing up in Australia during the 1950s and 1960s.

Growing Up is now available as an eBook at $4.65. Click here

'A simple but wise collection of short stories that meander through the mysteries of ‘growing up…’  Abigail Makim.

'Anthony Hill documents the journey in masterly fashion…'

William Taylor, Viewpoint.

In the Introduction, I remark that the collection began when my young daughter once asked what it was like ‘in the olden days’. As I remembered the day the War ended when I was three, writing on slates, the Royal Tours, stove pipe trousers, rock ’n’ roll, our first television, and fears of the H Bomb at the height of the Cold War, the stories took shape in my mind.

Inevitably they are studded with fragments of myself like raisins in a pudding.

But the broader aim is to remind that, however much the externals might have changed, the internals – the fun, the fear and the uncertainties of growing up – are the same now as they ever were.

Cover of Growing Up and Other Stories eBook 

‘This is social history in its most appealing form from one of Australia’s leading exponents writing for young people…. Sandy Campbell, Canberra Times