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(More customer reviews)had just begun in 1912.'
This novel, first published in 1939, was Kylie Tennant's second novel. It is a novel about life in the slums of inner Sydney, a novel that Kylie Tennant researched by living and working in the area.The pages are peopled with many different but memorable characters, whose lives emerge as the book progresses. The squalor in which many of the characters live is a combination of ignorance, unemployment, financial insecurity, alcoholism and sickness. Slum landlords and political opportunism make difficult lives even harder. And yet, despite the evictions, the grinding poverty and the crime, the lives and loves of a number of the characters demonstrate incredible spirit and adaptability.
Foveaux itself - from the rarefied air breathed in Upper Foveaux, through the rows of terraces in Middle Foveaux , right to the depths of the Foot of Foveaux - is the main character in this novel. Honest John Hutchison, the master of local government wheeling and dealing, Bob Noblett, the alcoholic barrowman and Bill Bross the slum landlord are the colourful central characters who tie much of the story together.
I enjoyed this novel for its depiction of early 20th century inner city Sydney life, for its descriptions of how life was for many people during this period.
`Perhaps the last time that Foveaux came out in all of its old glory was the day of the Eight Hour Day Procession.'
Jennifer Cameron-Smith
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'Foveaux' was Kyle Tennant's second novel and was drawn from her experiences living in the then disease-ridden slums of Redfern and Surry Hills in the late 1930s. It is a substantial novel of Sydney recounting the inner city around William Street in the first decades of the twentieth century.
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