The Envelope is a vivid and at times, terrible, picture of life in an Australian orphanage in the 1930s to the 1950s.
Written from the standpoint of a child admitted at a very young age, the author has managed, on the whole, not to let adult hindsight colour his writing.
The spontaneity and vigour of his writing do much to relieve the overall unexpectedly grim (to a non-orphaned reader) description of institutional life.
