Sean Dooley’s father Baz is your typical Aussie larrikin who loves his pub, his mates, his meat and, when he finally returns home many hours later to a cold meal, his family. Part autobiography, part memoir, this book is an amusing look back at Australian suburban life in the seventies and eighties with an artistic mother married to a loud-mouthed bookmaker from the wrong side of the tracks. Sean works with his father as a bookie to pay his way through university but chooses bird-watching and literature over interminable drinking and yarn sessions at the bar.

Among the smiles this memoir evokes is the unconditional love shown by Baz towards Di when she is dying from her second bout of cancer. Emaciated, bedridden, in pain and having no appetite, Baz goes to extraordinary lengths to tempt her palate with an array of his deliciously home-cooked meals. It is during these heart-wrenching times that Baz and Sean reconnect and discover the glories in the common ground they thought they’d lost.

Sean Dooley was a Readings Glenfern Fellow.