Reprint of the popular autobiography about growing up in the bush during the Great Depression. first published 1964. Author's other books include 'The Anzacs' (the 'Age' Book of the Year in 1978), 'There Was a Ship' and 'Romance of the Australian Railways'.
Patricia Jean Smith and her sister, Miss Mickie, grew up as railway children, their parents a station-mistress and a fettler. The catalogue of towns they lived in reverberates with the once-familiar clatter of metal and steam, but it was the tiny one-pub town of Waaia, in the centre of Victoria's wheat-rich Goulburn Valley, that kept drawing them back.

These were days of yabbying and rabbiting, of bush girls riding bareback on wilful ponies, and of the tin-lizzies that transformed the Mallee forever. It was a time for learning, for devouring books and for satisfying a powerful thirst for knowledge. And then it was a time for war.

Hear the Train Blow tells of Patsy Adam-Smith's classic upbringing during the Great Depression. It is a celebration of the ordinary people of Australia, and of a life that no longer exists.