Aunts up the Cross

My great-aunt Juliet was knocked over and killed by a bus when she was eighty-five. The bus was travelling very slowly in the right direction and could hardly have been missed by anyone except Aunt Juliet, who must have been travelling very fast in the wrong direction.

So begins Robin Dalton's story of her childhood, a secure and magic place surrounded by eccentric aunts and uncles and an army of guests and hangers-on sharing a sprawling, disorderly house in the bohemian heart of Sydney's Kings Cross.

This small and perfect memoir of a solitary child loose in a house full of outrageous, theatrical and utterly unpredictable adults has become a classic.