All the Green Year

The year I remember best from those days is 1929. This was the year I turned fourteen and went into the eighth grade; the year too that Grandfather McDonald became peculiar and we moved to live with him in his house on the cliffs.

It was the end of an era; a year of ‘outlandish happenings’; a time when everything seemed to change for Charlie Reeve, a daydreaming lad growing up in a small town on the Mornington Peninsula.

His teacher and dad are giving him a hard time, his neighbour Squid keeps getting him into trouble, and his best mate Johnno is busy seeing a girl—which leads Charlie to a nasty fight with Big Simmons.

First published in 1965, and subsequently made into a popular ABC TV series, All the Green Year is the story of a boy’s journey towards adulthood—‘not only the humour of it but its drama and pain’, as the 96-year-old Don Charlwood writes in his revised afterword.

About the Author

Don Charlwood was born in Melbourne in 1915 and raised in Frankston, the background for his much-loved novel All the Green Year (1965), which was later made into an ABC TV series. During the Depression he walked through Victoria’s Otway forest to the Western District, where he worked as a farmhand and began writing.

Charlwood joined the RAAF and served with Bomber Command in Britain during World War II, an experience that informed his first book, No Moon Tonight, published in 1956 and in print ever since. He then worked for thirty years in Air Traffic Control and the Department of Civil Aviation. When he retired in the mid-1970s an award for the air traffic control trainee of the year was named in his honour.

In 1978 Charlwood delivered the memorial oration for the centenary of the wreck of the Loch Ard and published Settlers Under Sail, commissioned by the Victorian government. Marching as to War (1990) and Journeys into Night (1991), two volumes of autobiography, each won the Fellowship of Australian Writers (Vic.) Christina Stead Award. Aged ninety Charlwood published The Wreck of the Sailing Ship Netherby.