Sunnybank State School had a large collection of Readers Digest magazines. They seemed to me to be already old by the time I read them in the early 1970s. I was one of the most advanced readers in my class, so I spent plenty of time immersed in their pages while other classmates were still struggling with basic reading tasks like distinguishing was from saw . It was a strange world to inhabit and I still carry little bits of it around with me. Many of the stories were childhood memoirs, written in the 1950s and 1960s about a time which seemed both harder and more innocent. Children lived idyllic lives in small town America. Their fathers went to work while their mothers stayed home and baked johnnycakes. We never knew exactly what a johnnycake* was but this didn't prevent my friends from calling me "Cake" in the latter years of primary school. I suppose the stories were meant to strengthen our moral fibre, and God knows we needed it. I'm a little hazy now
'Contemplating the teeming life of the shore, we have an uneasy sense of the communication of some universal truth that lies just beyond our grasp.' - Rachel Carson