The Boy From Beggerville - Peter Jackson;Peter Jackson

Based on a true story.

The Boy from Beggerville is a raw Australian novel set from the late 1970s into the 1980s.

PJ is an eight-year-old white boy who finds refuge in an Aboriginal community near Katherine, in Australia's Northern Territory - the only place that feels like home - before he is taken and sent 3,600 kilometres south to St Vincent's Boys' Home in Western Sydney. Behind the gates, he learns the truth fast.

Inside the home, punishment rules. Abuse hides behind prayer, discipline and authority. Crying makes you weak. Talking back gets you belted. Silence becomes armour. Childhood becomes something you bury just to survive the day.

But inside Beggerville, PJ finds friends who know that sticking together is their only survival.

Raw, brutal and unmistakably Australian, The Boy from Beggerville is a story of an eight-year-old boy taken from the only home he knows, thrown into a system that mistakes cruelty for discipline, and forced to survive long enough to remember who he is. It is not a soft story. It is survival, abuse, memory, damage, defiance - and the long road back to belonging.

The Marist Brothers called it care.The boys called it Beggerville.