'At fourteen Miro Bilbrough falls out with the communist grandmother who has raised her since she was seven, and is sent to live with her father and his rural-hippy friends. It is 1978, Canvastown, New Zealand, and the Floodhouse is a dwelling of pre-industrial gifts and deficiencies set on the banks of the Wakamarina River, which routinely invades its rooms.
'Isolated in rural poverty, the lives of Miro and her father and sister are radically enhanced by the Manaroans—charismatic hippies who use their house as a crash pad on journeys to and from a commune in a remote corner of the Marlborough Sounds. Arriving by power of thumb, horseback and hooped canvas caravan, John of Saratoga, Eddie Fox, Jewels and company set about rearranging the lives and consciousness of the blasted family unit.
'In the Time of the Manaroans brilliantly captures a largely unwritten historical culture, the Antipodean incarnation of the Back to the Land movement. Contrarian, idealistic, sexually opportunistic and self-mythologising too, this was a movement, as the narrator duly discovers, not conceived with adolescents in mind.' (Publication summary)
'On 26 March 2021, in a window between lockdowns, author and filmmaker Miro Bilbrough and I met to discuss her free-wheeling memoir, In the Time of the Manaroans (Ultimo Press, 2021). The conversation transcribed here was shared with a wide audience via Zoom as part of the online ‘Room to Listen’ seminar series, hosted in Parramatta by the Writing and Society Research Centre at Western Sydney University. I now invite you to read, listen and absorb Miro’s flair for poetic storying.' (Introduction)
'I’ve been in therapy for nearly half a decade and I’m only now re-connecting with aspects of myself that I tried to leave behind. Still, now, in my late thirties, I find myself too embarrassed to look back. From where I stand, it is heroic to relive the emotional and physical experience of being teenage again and braver still to write and publish a memoir about it. And so, despite being a teenager clearly in thrall to shame and confusion, Miro Bilbrough’s memoir goes back and fearlessly recounts some of the intense, awkward, difficult and beautiful details that mark her transition to adulthood.' (Introduction)
'I’ve been in therapy for nearly half a decade and I’m only now re-connecting with aspects of myself that I tried to leave behind. Still, now, in my late thirties, I find myself too embarrassed to look back. From where I stand, it is heroic to relive the emotional and physical experience of being teenage again and braver still to write and publish a memoir about it. And so, despite being a teenager clearly in thrall to shame and confusion, Miro Bilbrough’s memoir goes back and fearlessly recounts some of the intense, awkward, difficult and beautiful details that mark her transition to adulthood.' (Introduction)
'On 26 March 2021, in a window between lockdowns, author and filmmaker Miro Bilbrough and I met to discuss her free-wheeling memoir, In the Time of the Manaroans (Ultimo Press, 2021). The conversation transcribed here was shared with a wide audience via Zoom as part of the online ‘Room to Listen’ seminar series, hosted in Parramatta by the Writing and Society Research Centre at Western Sydney University. I now invite you to read, listen and absorb Miro’s flair for poetic storying.' (Introduction)
