Cirrus@Austlit

'He was 42 and one of Australia's most successful criminal barristers.She was 14, a runaway with nowhere to go. She later learnt the barrister had paid her grandmother. She had been sold... So begins Barbara Biggs's inside account of the dark side of the permissive seventies. The episode is to haunt her for years. But it is only one part of an extraordinary family story told with black humour and unflinching honesty. At 13 she runs away from home for wayward girls. At 16 she admits herself to a psychiatric hospital. At 18 she escapes Cambodia as it falls to the Khmer Rouge. At 19 she is a prostitute in Japan. At 21 she threw unionism into chaos making headlines around Australia. And lives to tell the tale. This is it.'