Girlie: a fictional biography

Sometimes heroes are ordinary people doing the best they can in confusing times. Against the backdrop of the Second World War coming to an end, and a time of change into the early 1950s, teenager and young woman, Eileen Bonney, wrestles with webs of love, deceit and secrets as she tries to define herself amid the expectations, demands, friendships and lies of others. Leaving school at age 13 to care for a distraught and ill mother and five siblings, abandoned but overseen by a philandering father, pursued by a deceitful older lover, fighting a battle with tuberculosis, Eileen survives as best she can in the hope that, one day, her world will be better. This is a collage of an ordinary young woman’s coming of age in the 1940s and early 1950s, a time when Australian social mores and expectations were very different, and the impact and aftermath of a World War and austerity threw many ordinary Australian lives into disarray. Not all heroes achieve greatness and thrive in challenging times. Some simply survive.