My Secret Beer Garden

For good reason, Mandy Sayer has rarely strayed from the maxim "write about what you know." Her vagabond life has been the mother lode of her prose. In Dreamtime Alice, the memoir of her early adulthood, readers discovered where some of her fictional fringe dwellers came from. Velocity (Vintage; 302 pages), a gritty prequel to that celebrated work, provides even more clues to the source of Sayer's creativity. Out of her childhood - from a bizarre conception in May 1962 to the end of her erratic schooldays in 1979 - Sayer has spun an Australian booze opera about the end of the country's postwar golden years. "I knew all the beer gardens in Sydney by the time I was eight," she begins.

Sayer's jazz drummer father, Gerry, and Betty, her frazzled mother, are bottle buddies who happen to have three small children. When her parents split, Sayer's freewheeling childhood descends into a grim saga: she moves from suburb to suburb, school to school, always at the mercy of Betty's genius for sabotaging her own security and picking up the wrong bloke at the pub. Amid this culture of poverty, mental illness, domestic violence, alcoholism and fear, Sayer blossoms. She finds ways to escape the misery, if only in bursts, through poetry, martial arts and music. Friends drop in and out, as does Gerry, but Sayer's resilience is the bedrock of the story. There's a charm and grace (and goofiness) in the adolescent Sayer, whose telling evokes the quiet dignity Henry Lawson found a century ago in the "sallow faces" and "weary feet" of the underclass.

Within this milieu of women's refuges, fortnightly pensions, brutality and exasperation, Sayer manages not only to survive but to grow. The other side of drifting is freedom and a spirit of adventure. She attends a "free school" in Melbourne where the subjects include creative writing, Indian studies and weaving. The people she meets there draw her out of herself and into the world with speed and direction. Velocity is intoxicating - but don't even think of matching the drinking in it. And heed the advice of a dying man, who advises Sayer to "never mix morphine with metho."