Good Living Street by Tim Bonyhady: review Growing up in Australia in the Sixties, the art historian and environmental lawyer Tim Bonyhady loved visiting his grandmother, Gretl, and great-aunt, Kathe, in their Sydney flat. What he didn't realise was that the apartment was crammed with treasures: a jewel of fin-de-siècle Viennese Secession artefacts, transported to Botany Bay. Bonyhady knew nothing about his Viennese heritage because his mother, Anne, had asked Gretl not to talk about it, so that Tim and his brother Bruce could grow up as Australian as possible. Only when Gretl and Kathe died, in 1975 and 1976, did Tim become intrigued by his family history. In 1911, they bought a large house at 4 Wohllebengasse - "Good Living Street." There they raised their children in an atmosphere of privileged aestheticism. Hermine and Moritz's marriage was devotedly happy. Their children were not so lucky. Gretl made a short-lived marriage before returning to live unhappily in her parents" home with her daughter, Annelore. Aged 15, Annelore had just enjoyed her first ball season when her luxurious world was destroyed by the Nazi invasion of Austria. With a broken marriage to a fellow refugee, Tim's mother, Anne, found it so painful to look back on her Viennese childhood that she rejected it almost completely, destroying family papers and selling the contents of the Sydney flat after Gretl and Kathe's deaths - although she did, reluctantly, write a memoir at her son's request. With the help of his mother's recollections, surviving volumes of his grandmother's diary and assiduous research, Bonyhady has reconstructed the story of three generations of his family. It is an epic task, and an act of filial affection. "I embarked on this book because of Anne," he writes. I wanted to put a value on her life that she did not. The story's vast scope would be a test of any writer's skill, and Bonyhady's narrative sometimes is in danger of vanishing beneath historical detail. He hasn't the happy knack of illuminating a character or a scene with a single deft detail, and there is a certain doggedness to his style that can test the reader's determination. But it is worth persisting, for the vivid combination of glittering privilege and tragedy that surrounds the Gallia family story. Good Living Street: The Fortunes of My Viennese Family Tim Bonyhady Allen & Unwin, £16.99, 464pp