A SIMPLER TIME
A memoir of love, laughter, loss and billycarts
Peter FitzSimons
Harper Collins -  $39.99

It still amazes me what they allowed us to do without their supervision or help while remaining deeply loving parents. Climb trees from the age of four or five? No problems. Drive the tractor from the age of eight or nine? Good luck to you. Haul on the hoist to pull the half-ton bins filled with oranges off the trailer? Yes. Take your bike out on the Pacific Highway and ride to school? Just be careful, but okay . . .

Peter FitzSimons’s account of growing up, one of six children on a farm on the rural outskirts of Sydney in the 1960s, is first and foremost a tribute to family. But it is also a salute to times and generations past, when praise was understated but love unstinting, when work was hard and values clear, when people stood by each other in adversity.

Witty, tender and wise, A Simpler Time is told with good humour and enormous self-deprecation. Peter comments, ‘They say if you had a happy childhood you remember the sun shining…whereas if you had an unhappy childhood you remember wet Wednesday afternoons, trudging home from school. When I look back on my life in that family…I remember the sun shining’.

See Peter talk about his book here  http://www.youtube.com/user/HarperBooksAus

About Peter FitzSimons: 

Peter FitzSimons is a journalist with the Sydney Morning Herald and Sun-Herald and has interviewed everyone from President George Bush Snr to Sir Edmund Hillary, and every Australian Prime Minister since Gough Whitlam.
He is also a popular after-dinner speaker and the only Wallaby sent from the field against the All Blacks — unjustly, he swears. Peter is the author of twenty-one books — including biographies of Nancy Wake, Kim Beazley, Nick Farr-Jones, Steve Waugh, Les Darcy, John Eales and Charles Kingsford Smith — and was Australia’s bestselling non-fiction writer in 2001 and 2004. He is the author of the number-one best-selling military history books Kokoda and Tobruk. He lives in Sydney with his wife Lisa Wilkinson and their three children.
And I reckon if a poll was taken on this side of the Tasman FitzSimons would emerge as New Zealander's most-liked Aussie. A really nice guy, quick-witted with a hugely appealing sense of humour.