Issue Details: First known date: 2022... 2022 Adele Dumont Reviews Childhood by Shannon Burns
The material on this page is available to AustLit subscribers. If you are a subscriber or are from a subscribing organisation, please log in to gain full access. To explore options for subscribing to this unique teaching, research, and publishing resource for Australian culture and storytelling, please contact us or find out more.

AbstractHistoryArchive Description

'Anyone writing about their childhood must grapple with the intervening gulf of time, and with the strange slipperiness of memory. This is especially so for Shannon Burns, who today lives a stable, contented life in the higher echelons of Australia’s middle class, but whose early years, he now recognises, were chaotic and perilous, peopled by adults who were unreliable, volatile, and sometimes violent. Childhood charts Burns’ upbringing in 1980s suburban Adelaide: he is passed between his mother (his ‘true home’ (88)), his father and stepmother, various relatives, and foster carers. Aged fifteen, he leaves school, escapes his father’s place and finds work in a recycling centre. Despite all this dislocation and instability, and despite Burns’ well-developed talent for forgetting, Childhood doesn’t read as fragmentary or disjointed: rather, the narrative is sculpted so skilfully that it is never less than propulsive.'(Introduction)

Publication Details of Only Known VersionEarliest 2 Known Versions of

Last amended 5 Jan 2023 09:19:43
https://www.mascarareview.com/adele-dumont-reviews-childhood-by-shannon-burns/ Adele Dumont Reviews Childhood by Shannon Burnssmall AustLit logo Mascara Literary Review
Review of:
Newspapers:
    Powered by Trove
    X