In 2020, a striking collaboration between artists of stage and screen honours the trials and triumphs of extraordinary everyman A.B Facey, whose award-winning Australian classic autobiography, A Fortunate Life, has been adapted for theatrical presentation. Albert Barnett Facey born in Maidstone, Victoria, Australia, in 1894, the youngest of seven children. His father died when he was two of typhoid fever. When Bert was four, his Grandpa died. Bert's mother then left the rest of her children to be looked after by their grandmother to go to the Goldfields, but met and married another man and had nothing further to do with Bert's upbringing.
Facey had been making notes on his life since an early age, at the urging of his wife, he eventually wrote them up into a full manuscript, by hand, in a series of exercise books, working at the kitchen table. He then had the manuscript typed up and sent it to Fremantle Arts Centre Press, requesting that twenty copies be printed and bound for family members and friends. Facey's story was so remarkable, however, that it was immediately accepted for commercial publication. It appeared just nine months before his death on 11 February 1982, in his 88th year.