Life at the Bottom

Statistics tell us it's a golden time in Australia: sustained economic growth, lots of jobs, growing household incomes. The thousands of Australians struggling on low wages might tell a different story, but they don't often get the chance to do so. Thank goodness, then, for Elisabeth Wynhausen, who decided the best way to listen to the poor was to struggle and sweat alongside them. For her book Dirt Cheap: Life at the Wrong End of the Job Market (Macmillan; 246 pages), she shed her identity as a senior newspaper journalist and took up residence in a world most people never see....