John Docker grew up in Bondi, the son of Communist parents, his mother Jewish from the East End of London and his father of Irish descent. His Bondi is not the site of sunny mindlessness but rather a place of intense immigrant and political life. This book traces his often comic experiences at Bondi Wellington Primary School and Randwick Boys High School. At the University of Sydney from 1963, he became a teenage Leavisite and participated in the anarchistic New Left. With Ann Curthoys he travelled on the Hippie Trail through Asia to London, which became for both the scene of what Gorky referred to as the University of Life.