After two years spent living in scummy hostels, Jimmy Barnes’s parents found a brick house on Heytesbury Road in the Adelaide suburb of Elizabeth West. They promised the kids a garden, perhaps a veggie patch, but like the marriage, that garden went to seed. His parents “found friends just like the ones they’d had back in Scotland” and the drinking and violence escalated.
Barnes’s life, six decades later, is a charmed one, and – against all odds – he’s learned to relax. He does pilates. He gardens. He has a book club. But although his latest collection of stories, Highways and Byways, contains many a rip-roarin’ tale, what also comes across loud and clear is a constant vigilance. Just like his garden, Barnes keeps his psyche well tended.
