Good Living Street: The Fortunes of My Viennese Family by Tim Bonyhady

JUDGES' COMMENTS

Good Living Street tells the story of three generations of women in the author’s family, including their experiences as an aspirant Jewish group living in Vienna before and during the Nazi ascendancy, and their subsequent post-1938 lives as refugees in geographically and culturally remote Sydney. The book makes judicious use of family letters, diaries and photographs to reconstruct a rich, contextual family history. This is never a reverential or sentimental story, but it is one told with a justifiable hint of nostalgia.

A strength of this book is the way it locates its story and characters within a rich set of cultural and social contexts. In this story fin de siècle Vienna (with its creative giants Mahler and Klimt), the Nazi dictatorship culminating in Kristallnacht, the provincial world of ‘colonial’ forties and fifties Sydney, and the expanding cultural complexity of post-War Australia all serve as critical backgrounds in explaining the ideas, aspirations and actions of Bonyhady’s female relatives.