Barefoot Kids
Five Indigenous cousins in Broome decide to form a band. At first it is just for fun, but things become serious when their dreaming place at Eagle Beach comes under threat, and the mystery of the missing World War Two diamonds becomes a crucial thread in their battle to save it.
Publisher: Fremantle Press
Paperback
Published 2007, PP 375
ISBN 9781920731533
No longer available for sale. You’ll have to check your library or trawl the second hand bookshops if you want to enjoy this one!
Music is in the Jirroo kids’ blood. Their dads play in a covers band that is a Broome institution. Jamming at the shack down at Eagle Beach, 13 year old cousins Janey and Jimmy realise they have a song in the making. Before any of them quite realise what is happening, Jimmy’s little sister Tich, and their other cousins Dancer and Buddy, the trouble prone drummer, have joined in to form a band, the Barefoot Kids.
Buddy is the one who discovers the surveyor pegs that turn out to be the first sign of Big Al’s plans for a new resort development at Eagle Beach, the home of Jiir Rock – a site in the eagle dreaming.
The rumble of bulldozers threatens to drown out their music. New dangers and ancient secrets collide as Janey and the band lead the fight to save Eagle Beach. Old murders, hidden graves, and the mystery of a fortune in missing diamonds from a plane that crash landed up the coast in World War Two are all part of the mix. The truth is murky, chasing it becomes dangerous; but the Barefoot Kids will not be deterred.
From the author
Back in the day, with my friends Alan and Stephen Pigram of the legendary Pigram Brothers band, and old mate Ken Kelso, we set out to make a kids television adventure series about a gang of musical kids from Broome. We got incredibly close to getting it into production, but got knocked back at the last hurdle. In the meantime we had these fantastic stories in script format. I wasn’t willing to let them die. Barefoot Kids – the title is taken from a Pigram Brothers song – is the result. It was my first full length work of fiction, and I love it still.
It also provided the seeds of my first novel for adults, The Valley, that came out eleven years later.
If you have kids that are into reading, I would really urge you to seek this out if you can. This is not about chasing sales; I won’t make a dime from any second-hand purchases. Keen young readers are voracious to discover new worlds, be they real or imagined. The world of this book is a real one; it gives a window into a slice of Indigenous Australia, and Kimberley history, and is also a non-stop adventure. It is big and ambitious, but it never talks down or condescends.