Nadia Wheatley’s Evie is sixteen, but “a very young sixteen”, in her own and others’ opinion. She supervises her young half-sisters with practised competence and accepts responsibility for much of the housekeeping, but in the manner of a sleepwalker. ‘‘Evie hated being asked what she thought of things, because everything seemed as grey and floppy as everything else…(she) thought less of herself too, because other people thought she was boring and because it was very frustrating for Evie herself never knowing what she liked or wanted”. Life in suburban Campbelltown had been pleasant but unremarkable, despite the low-keyed hostility between Evie and her stepfather and her inability to find a job since leaving school. Then the family shifted to old, inner-city Newtown with its rich and crowded past, and unimaginative Evie became caught up in a violent drama that shifts between past and present which jolts her into a new awareness of herself and her surroundings. The plot of The House That Was Eureka is woven around an absorbing and wholly convincing recreation of the Depression of the 1930s, with the traumatic experiences of the Cruise family, destitute and threatened with eviction, running parallel to the problems of today. The theme, however, is self-discovery, as Evie identifies with the vanished Lizzie Cruise and draws from her growing understanding of Lizzie’s dreams and ambitions the insight to understand her own.

Waiting for the end of the world, first published in 1983 in hardback, is a story of the 21st century and an Australia of fascist city states, the population drugged into passive conformity. Manfred, like other young people before him, manages to escape, but at the cost of a long and destructive illness from drug withdrawal. He recovers with only fragmentary memories of his former life and the innocence of a young child, cared for by other refugees as he stumbles, slowly and hesitatingly, toward an understanding of himself and a vision of his part in creating a better society. Like Lizzie, Evie, Lennie and even Lilli, Manfred finds hope in identification with others and with dreams that are more universal than those of self. Lee Harding’s novels, like those of David Martin, always seem to be slightly ahead of their time; Manfred’s journey will have meaning for thoughtful young people for many years to come.

Agnes Tucker is too old to attempt to change anyone else’s social patterns. She merely wants the freedom to be herself in peace, and realises she has been pushed by well-meaning relatives into a position in which this is impossible: and ‘‘strong in spirit, peaceful in mind, slow in legs and stiff in back”, she takes alternative action. A Little Fear is a small masterpiece, beautifully written, full of a wry humour and sudden insights and a sure sense of place and being. With Mrs Tucker and the Njimbin the Bunyip’s quest has come full circle, in a novel that should be published in adult as well as juvenile editions, for its message is as ageless as its appeal.

In Catch the Sun Lennie is seventeen, and like Evie a school leaver with no job qualifications and a hostile stepfather. She has employment of a sort but it is futureless and boring; determined not to fall into the domestic rut of the women she sees around her, Lennie runs off to the big smoke. Life in Adelaide, however has its own problems, with more sophisticated but no less difficult options, and Lennie’s journey of self discovery takes her from unemployment centre through a sampling of a number of lifestyles before she settles down to a serious effort at improving her chances in the marketplace. Lennie, unlike Evie, is no introverted dreamer, but a tough fighter all the way, and Erica Hale’s picture of the life of young, disillusioned school leavers, caught up in a system in which they are irrelevant and unwanted, is perceptive, poignant, and often wryly funny. It shares with Puberty Blues (which Lennie is reading as the story opens) the distinction of being drawn from life in all its intense, gutsy authenticity.

Lilli Stubeck, like Lizzie Cruise, is a child of the Depression, but the scene is St Helen on the Murray River instead of Sydney’s Newtown. Lilli’s story is told in retrospect by the childhood friend who watches the unfolding drama of her life respectfully from the wings. The setting is a typical small town of the ’30s, smug, conservative and self-contained, and Lilli is an outsider from the first, one of a large family of fringe-dwellers who exist precariously on the leavings of the more solid citizens, sometimes openly and sometimes by theft. Lilli becomes the protege of the town’s wealthy and relatively cosmopolitan middle-class spinster, who attempts to educate her, Eliza Doolittle fashion. But Lilli is herself, strong and enigmatic, and remains so in spite of the pressures visited upon her, a heroic but totally misunderstood figure to the day of her exit with the town’s other eccentric, Devlin the utopian dreamer. 'She was Lilli Stubeck or she was nobody, and though many people thought her behaviour a natural reversion to the gypsy I knew it was rather a reversion to something indestructible in Lilli that had kept her on her feet when so often she should have been on her knees’ says the narrator.

Snapcott’s story is, on the surface, a run-of-the-mill holiday adventure in which three children (including the time-honoured pommie new chum) and parents visit their cottage on Stradbroke Island for the summer break. It departs from the formula swiftly however with the introduction of the boy Ken, wild and violent and clearly emotionally unbalanced, who gradually reveals his obsession with his missing father and a lost family ikon, believed to be cursed. Ken discovers that his father is missing, believed drowned, and the ikon has been seen in the possession of another man, now also drowned. It reappears on the man’s damaged launch – waiting for Ken to bring the curse to its conclusion? Like Lilli, Ken is seen only in fragments, from the outside, and his journey of discovery is a private introspection whose dark shadows only hint at the tensions and pressures of a young person caught in the tidal rip of conflicting cultures.