12 Edmondstone Street was published by Chatto & Windus in 1985. The book is a memoir of Malouf’s childhood in South Brisbane during the 1940s — a collection of linked essays rather than a continuous narrative, each exploring a different dimension of the world he grew up in.
The house itself — a wooden Queensland house on stilts, with its gardens, its verandahs, its underneath spaces — is rendered with the same attention to physical detail that characterizes Malouf’s fiction. He writes about the texture of wood, the quality of tropical light, the sounds of rain on iron roofs, the smells of the garden, the particular spatial arrangements of Australian domestic architecture. The house becomes not merely a setting but an education: the child’s first map of the world, the place where perception and consciousness are formed.
The family — his Lebanese father, his English mother, the aunts and grandparents — are presented through the child’s partial understanding: adult relationships whose full significance only becomes clear in retrospect. Malouf writes about his father’s immigrant displacement, his mother’s cultural confidence, the negotiation between Lebanese and English identities that produced his own complex sense of belonging.
The wartime context — Brisbane was a major military base, under Japanese bombing threat, full of American soldiers — provides both danger and excitement. For the child, war is not primarily fear but intensity: the world is charged with significance, every sound matters, every stranger might be important.
The memoir is as much about the formation of a writer as about the events of a childhood: Malouf shows how attention to the physical world, how the habit of precise observation, how the love of language first took root in a specific place and time.
Collecting 12 Edmondstone Street
First edition (Chatto & Windus, London, 1985): Cloth binding, dust jacket.
Market values:
- First edition, fine/fine: $30–$80
- Very good/very good: $10–$30