Journeyings begins with a tram journey—the sixty-nine tram collecting boys and girls from Melbourne's middle-class heartland on their first day of school for 1934. It marks the beginning of an extraordinary journey through Australian private life that commences with the gold rushes of the 1850s and concludes in our own time, tracing the life journeyings of a generation of boys and girls from four of Melbourne's legendary private schools.
In an engrossing and highly original exploration of one of the most neglected subjects in Australian social history—the middle class—Janet McCalman has produced a worthy successor to her acclaimed portrait of working-class life, Struggletown.