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Monday, July 21, 2025

88-year-old author tells troubling tale of family violence

First-time book author, Victorian man, Barry Revill, is about to see the story of his life come to life in print at the age 88.

Barry (pictured) says he wanted to write a book which explored the difficult and often unspoken issue of family violence.

“The book is written through the eyes of a young boy,” he says.

Diary of a Young Boy is based upon my life growing up in Melbourne suburbs.”

“In unaffected prose, Barry Revill takes us back to the Australia of his childhood, a time of
simple pleasures and caring communities ready to heal each other’s wounds. He shows us
that, while some of the ties that bind drag us down, others offer liberation through the
grace of small mercies,” says award-winning Melbourne-based author, copywriter, and editor, Paul Mitchell or Barry’s literary offering.

Told in a wise, frightened, lonely and often bewildered youthful voice, Barry’s book is a coming-of-age story that takes the reader through an unremitting, vivid, stifling and beautifully moving portrait of a boy as an outsider in a working-class Melbourne
family during the 1930s and 40s.

Readers are taken on a journey from inner city Melbourne to the coastal town of Mornington, to the harsh market gardens of Clarinda, near Clayton, and then to an early working life as a deprived thirteen-year-old boy, thrust into a woollen mill in Bentleigh when he longs to remain at school.

Throughout the text, Barry tries to find personal comfort and solace whilst living with a
violent, unsupportive father, a hard-working mother skeptical of books and education, and
much younger siblings who cannot yet offer companionship. A library card, walking
peninsula roads and two significant and unlikely friendships afford him some protection.

He meets a book-reading man living in a shack in the Mornington scrubland and a German
woman working in the woollen mill who is trying to build a new life. These unlikely
friendships tie him to worlds of kindness and understanding not found at home.

“Barry was once a contributor to the early days of Overland magazine and the echoes of
influential Australian writers such as Ruth Park, Darcy Niland and Frank Hardy can be
traced in his writing,” according to the book’s publisher, Ginninderra Press.

“Importantly, however, Revill’s own teenage voice shines clearly through to present a
marginalised Melbourne and a family disbelieving that they can climb out of their origins.

“Diary of a Young Boy is a brave and heartbreaking portrait of a boy who is given little room to develop and must be highly resilient to survive. Furthermore, it is an important historical
document of working-class Melbourne and its developing surrounds that is just beginning to
fall from living memory.”

Diary of a Young Boy is available at www.ginninderrapress.com.au and at Benn’s Books, 437 Centre Rd, Bentleigh. The book has also been accepted into some Victorian libraries.

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