Stillways

A Memoir

A raw, rough, poetic, funny, intensely moving and quite, quite beautiful memoir about a boy from the bush, growing up in Australian in the sixties.

From one of Australia's favourite actors comes a classic memoir of an Australian childhood in the sixties.

Young Steve was a larrikin, happy-go-lucky, resilient kid, coming of age in a simpler time. Growing up on a farm cut from virgin scrub at the end of a lake, a farm called Stillways, Steve daydreamed about cars and escape. His story is about him heroworshipping his older brother with Brylcreem in his hair; going to school as a young kid with bus money knotted into a hanky and clutching his Globite schoolcase; fighting bullies at school and dreaming about girls; being amazed at the first television in town; remembering where he was when Marilyn Monroe died...

But there's a darker thread running through the story: the father who'd take out his frustrations by savagely belting his young children; a struggling mother who'd do anything to protect her kids; a young boy irrevocably marked by his father's anger.

Endearing, funny, honest and unflinching - this memoir will become an Australian classic.

'Tender and admirable' The Australian

'Poetic, evocative' Sydney Morning Herald

'We know Steve Bisley can act, but can he write? Bloody oath he can. Bisley evokes the Aussie bush so vividly you can smell the eucalypts and the cowpats and the hay and the bushfire smoke as you turn each page. You can hear the creek babbling, the kookas in the trees, the wind rustling the grass. Stillways is disarmingly, sometimes embarrassingly, honest. A book full of joy, anger, regret, hope, lust and love.' Hobart Mercury

'The astonishing thing about this memoir is that it contains so much joy.' Jennifer Byrne.

Shortlisted for the 2014 Douglas Stewart Prize for Non-Fiction in the NSW Premier's Literary Awards, the Queensland Literary Awards, and the 2014 National Biography Awards.