When: Thursday 28th August , 7.30pm

Cost: $25.00 includes admission &

Book Deal: Buy a copy of ‘And Be Home Before Dark’ (RRP $34.95)

at the time of ticket purchase, and get the book & ticket for $50.00

Phone: 9589 4638

E-mail: read@beaumarisbooks.com.au

And Be Home Before Dark is the heart-wrenching childhood memoir set in the dust and desolation ofoutback Western Australia in the 1950s. Roland Rocchiccioli spent his days watching the dramas of Gwaliaunfold: the horses that worked in the mines and went blind when they resurfaced; the young men who werekilled working underground; his mother’s desperate attempt at suicide and the prowler who lay in the dirtoutside Grinning Joe’s house. Roland encounters a plague of crickets that take over the chook houselavatory; a priest who bans him from being an altar boy and his mother who is hamstrung by the socialmores of the 1950s. The book’s pages are filled with a cavalcade of larger-than-life characters from acrossthe globe.There are the town’s no-hopers, Steve Rakich and Billy Woof-Woof; Roland’s surrogate mother,Wint; the glamorous church organist Lucy Tognali; Mad Mullocker who painted everything green –including the trees; and his two friends Nat Garbellini and Jan Quarti. Roland writes candidly about hisremarkable mother, Beria, whose indomitable spirit could never be broken; of his father Ginger, anunderground miner who came to Australia from Tuscany in 1926 and never recovered from the culturalshock; of Beria’s jealous husband Steve and of the domestic violence that cast a dark shadow over tracts ofhis childhood years. With his astonishing eye for detail and his sharp recollections, And Be Home Before

Dark is an illuminating story of optimism and determination which will touch your heart.

Roland Rocchiccioli has worked in the entertainment industry since 1966. He started out as the front endof Mavis the Dancing Horse in the pantomime Goldilocks and the Three Bears at the Circus. He has alsoworked in the theatre in England and America and is an experienced radio and television broadcaster andcolumnist. He wrote The Actor Who Laughed with the late Frank Thring and The AFL Cookbook.