Delusions of Grandeur - A Family's Story of Love and Struggle

Jukurrpa Books, 2003. Good secondhand condition.

Delusions of grandeur is a sweeping portrait of an Aboriginal family's battle for survival during the Depression years. Lucy Eatock is raised and educated by a respectable white family, but becomes an outcast when she chooses to marry a man of her own colour, a travelling boxer and wild jackeroo. Born in a camp tent, her son Roderick struggles valiantly in the back blocks of New South Wales and on the mean steets of Sydney for what he knows is right. He watches as those around him wrestle with poverty, racism and cruel injustice but are ultimately beaten down. He educates himself and during the heat of the struggles against mass-evictions and homelessness, falls in love with Elizabeth, a sassy, educated emigre from Scotland. Eventually the social barriers Roderick confronts and the psychological defences he constructs to survive them build to a pressure-cooker intensity. This is a true story told with warmth and humour.