AustLit

'The story opens in a courtroom, with an acidic, morally upright social worker arguing that Steve, his younger sister Alana and elder brother Ron should be taken from their kind but no-hoper mother and placed in State care.

'Twelve years later, Steve, now a happy-go-lucky 16-year-old has carved what he believes is a secure niche with two well-meaning foster parents with misguided social consciences.

'But they quickly show their colors [sic] when grandpa, first foot on the road to senility, moves in.

'"You're not our responsibility," Steve's 'mother' bridles, as she tells him there is no longer room in the house.

'Threatened and hurt, Steve runs away but wins a reprieve (this time) from the children's home by the intervention of David Wilding, an unconventional rather shambling social worker played by John Waters.

'The damage has been done though and over the next months we see Steve, sometimes helped by Wilding, attempt futile reconciliations with his father, a drunken itinerant, his mother, now under the thumb of a morose and drunken de facto, and his foster mother, who has deftly wiped the boy from her life.

'Along the way Steve gets into trouble, minor at first then as he begins to rage against rejection, more serious until he is sent to a youth training centre and finally jail.

'Wilding proffers one last scheme against the wishes of his do-it-by-the-book supervisor. He arranges for Steve to live with the one remaining light of his life, his nubile, rather dizzy sister, at 15, an unmarried mum.

'He's a devoted brother and an adoring uncle, but still the victim of others' calllousness, as we see in the final scenes. Steve's life is now well and truly mapped out–and it should never have happened that way.'

Source:

Barbara Hooks, 'A Slippery Slide to Despair', The Age, 18 September 1980, p.33.