Boyhoodlum

A hilarious memoir and a crash-investigator's report into how not to be a boy.Anson Cameron was born in the Victorian town of Shepparton in 1961, the son of a country lawyer and an English rose.Through the shoeless neighbourhoods and surrounding forests, sipping a Blue Heaven milkshake, shooting at anything that moves, and singing an Irish Rovers song, this boy wends his way smiling and lying and creating chaos in his wake.He joins a peeing club and becomes a tycoon of urine; assassinates the Cisco Kid; keeps a deaf man as an entertainment; starts a war between hags; electrocutes a friend's mother; and has a Bodgie clubbed by the police before he is seven. His war on schoolteachers means he is forced to cycle home from school dyed a different colour every day. At high school, with a maturing political outlook, he joins a gang of Anglos to fight a war on Wogs. There is hardly a trap of vanity into which he doesn't fall.With a wry narrator and a cast of rural originals, Boyhoodlum is a clear window into a time and place. It is the story of a family and a town through the eyes of a boy who laughed at them and loved them equally.