Overview

In 1932, during the dark days of the Great Depression, Charlie Davis, from the inner Sydney suburb of Newtown, is laid off from work. When he can no longer pay the rent, his family establishes a dwelling in a shanty town called Happy Valley, near Le Perouse on Sydney's eastern fringe. To make ends meet, Charlie and his son, Tom, follow in the footsteps of the original 'rabbitohs' who had already earned a place in Sydney's folklore, and they traipse the streets selling rabbits. During his days as a rabbitoh, Tom befriends a young Irish girl Hazel, and to the horror of her Catholic family, she becomes pregnant. With her infant, she joins Tom and his family at Happy Valley, but struggles in the dour conditions. She flees Happy Valley, deserting her baby Bill, knowing that she is now carrying another child. She seeks refuge in a cold and cruel institution for unmarried, pregnant girls and does what she needs to do, so she can have a life with her baby daughter, Nancy. Eight years later in 1940, both Tom and his father, Charlie, take their place in the theatre of war. When the war is over, Tom is reunited with his mother and young son, Bill. Tom begins his search for Hazel. When the search proves successful, both Tom and Hazel agree to hide their history, not wanting their son, Bill, to learn of his abandonment as a baby. Tom is introduced to Nancy as an old friend that her mother knew from before the war. Thrown together as stepsiblings, Bill and Nancy see nothing shameful in the romantic chemistry that exists between them, unaware that they are full siblings. When eventually Bill finds out that Nancy is his biological sister, he does what he can to distance himself from her, though by this time she is already pregnant. He sets up Nancy in a nearby suburb and manipulates the situation so that a neighbour, Mrs Green, becomes the carer of their developmentally delayed son, Leon. She becomes the child's 'ma'.

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After studying science at University, Kevin Radley worked in several laboring jobs, both in the city and on farms in the bush. While navigating his Kombi van around Australia in the early 1980's, working and writing along the way, he collided with a bull near the border between the Northern Territory and Western Australia. He was able to reassemble the front end of his smashed vehicle and limp his way into the Kimberly town of Broome, where he spent the dry season working in one of the two pubs in town. It was there that he wrote about the characters he encountered in a collection of short stories. When he returned to Sydney at the end of 1984, Kevin used samples of his stories in a successful application to join the team of story-liners for a new television series, 'Neighbours'. He worked in this capacity until the program was cut by Channel Seven and picked up by Channel Ten. Whilst maintaining an interest in writing, he threw himself wholeheartedly into a teaching career, nurturing a passion for delivering creative science lessons to his students. He taught in schools of Western Sydney for more than 30 years. On the home front, Kevin and his wife, Julianne, blended their families from previous marriages, for an eventful life in the Blue Mountains. During the final two years of teaching in the region, he wrote his first novel, 'The Teacher's Secrets'. In 2019, he moved with his wife to the mid-north coast of New South Wales, where he taught on a casual basis for a year while writing his second novel 'Thundersong'. Kevin retired from teaching in 2021 to focus on writing his third novel, 'Rabbit Town.'

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