A.B. Facey

Albert (Bert) Facey (31 August 1894 – 11 February 1982) was an Australian writer and World War I veteran, whose main work was his autobiography, A Fortunate Life, now considered a classic of Australian literature. It has sold more than 800,000 copies.

Facey was born in Maidstone, Victoria, the son of Joseph Facey and Mary Ann Facey, née Carr.His father died on the goldfields of Western Australia in 1896 of typhoid fever, when Albert was two years old. In 1898, Albert's mother departed for Western Australia to care for her older children, who had accompanied their father to the goldfields. She left her younger children, including Albert, to the care of their grandmother. When his grandfather died in 1898, the grandmother, Mrs Jane Carr, (née Barnett), moved with Albert and his siblings Roy (born 1890), Eric (born 1889) and Myra (born 1892) in 1899 from Barkers Creek near Castlemaine, Victoria, to Kalgoorlie, Western Australia. He began his working life around 1902, aged eight, and hardly ever lived with his family again. He was never able to attend school, but he managed to teach himself to read and write when he was in his teens.

On his first job as a farm boy, his employer subjected him to virtual slavery and violent beatings with a horse whip. After sustaining months of such abuse, Albert escaped by walking over 20 miles through the bush and luckily finding some new settlers that had camped. Although the police were informed of the abuse, his employer was never prosecuted. The scars on his back and neck from the injuries he had sustained remained evident for the rest of his life.

In 1908 Facey's mother remarried, and he travelled at her request to Perth to live with her and her second husband, a plumber named Arthur "Bill" Downie at Subiaco. However, he only stayed a short time before accepting work back in rural Western Australia. Thereafter Facey and his mother saw each other sporadically until she died suddenly in September 1914, aged 51. His childhood in Western Australia was spent in areas such as Kalgoorlie, Narrogin, Bruce Rock, Merredin, Yealering, Wickepin, Pingelly, and at Cave Rock, near Popanyinning, which he writes about in Chapter 2 of A Fortunate Life.

...
Wikipedia