Patricia Jean Smith and her sister, Miss Mickie, grew up as railway children, their parents a station-mistress and a fettler. The catalogue of towns they lived in reverberates with the once-familiar clatter of metal and steam, but it was the tiny one-pub town of Waaia, in the centre of Victoria's wheat-rich Goulburn Valley, that kept drawing them back.

These were days of yabbying and rabbiting, of bush girls riding bareback on wilful ponies, and of the tin-lizzies that transformed the Mallee forever. It was a time for learning, for devouring books and for satisfying a powerful thirst for knowledge. And then it was a time for war.

Hear the Train Blow tells of Patsy Adam-Smith's classic upbringing during the Great Depression. It is a celebration of the ordinary people of Australia, and of a life that no longer exists.