Pitched as an Australian coming of age story, Everything I Knew warns about unintended consequences from the pursuit of so-called love, particularly when boundaries are crossed.

Set in the small South Australian town of Penola in the early 1960s, the narrator is 14-year old Robbie Burns, the local policeman's son. Robbie?s life is an idyllic one of exploration and experimentation, both literally and metaphorically.

Specifically, it is 1964. The Beatles are touring Australia and the world is changing. The only hint of this change in isolated Penola, however, is the arrival of the dynamic and delectable new schoolteacher, Miss Pamela Peach.

Attractive and intelligent, Miss Peach characterises the modern woman. University-educated and sophisticated, she confidently smokes Kool cigarettes and rides a Vespa scooter. Only accessible to the other women in town through magazines, her modern clothes and Hepburn hair style cause as much envy as her good looks.

Robbie becomes infatuated with his new teacher and soon discovers her receptiveness to reviewing his short sci-fi stories. These speculative pieces not only serve as his way to ingratiate himself to her, but also serve as a medium in the novel for extrapolating what is happening in his adolescent world.

Pamela's mentorship of Robbie is tragically modelled on her own tutelage by an aging and married academic poet with whom she is having an affair of sorts. Boundaries have clearly been crossed with this former teacher-student relationship, but the drunken professor is too far impaired to be concerned about the ethics of his actions.

As the rainy season arrives, Robbie increasingly becomes the only person in town who Pamela can depend on. While she attempts to maintain professional boundaries, cracks start to appear until the seasonal metaphor is complete.

Everything I Knew is a technically excellent novel that is richly layered and well crafted. Goldsworthy's willingness to broach the almost taboo issue of teacher-student sexual relations from the perspective of the student is a challenge to the so-called 'innocence of youth'. The unintended consequences are shocking indeed, but one ends up not really knowing whether, in constructing the who is abusing whom scenario, Goldsworthy really 'gets it' beyond schoolboy fantasy.