Working-class settlements north of Sydney are the common setting for these two family sagas. Between them, they take us from the 1880s to 1951. Jack Wallis, who labours in a quarry in the sandstone country that gives Stephen Lacey’s book its title, is born in the early twentieth century; Edmund Shearer, a Newcastle miner of the coal or black diamonds of Greg Bogaerts’s title, nears his death b ...
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