'The unsettled South Australian frontier near Mount Gambier is a strange and difficult place for a Galway family trying to make sense of their new world.
'Rosanna and brother Skelly long to escape. Their older brother Edwin races against poets in steeplechases and schemes over cattle, carts and cards to get ahead. They are all half in love with a visiting priest and a disturbing Irish play about their ancestors.
'When she goes to work at a nearby station, Rosanna is caught up in a string of events—throwing a horserace, the allure of a visiting actor, violent threats to her Boandik friends, and the wreck of the Admella—that lead to a reckoning with the land, its histories, its religions and its ancient and recent cultures.'
Source: Publisher's blurb.
'What does it mean to tell the stories of one’s ancestors? How do human beings endure landscapes dominated by scarcity, isolation, gruelling labour, and patriarchal cruelty? And what is the price to be paid for survival?'(Introduction)
'Readers expect historical fiction novels not only to evoke authentically a particular time and place but also to be accessible and relatable to modern sensibilities by way of the problems that the characters face. In Unsettled author Gay Lynch sets out to do just this, by drawing on some of her own family’s stories and on factual events and persons in the Mt Gambier area of south-east South Australia and Melbourne, in the second half of the nineteenth century while, at the same time, having her characters deal with issues that are very familiar to 21st century Australians.' (Introduction)
'Readers expect historical fiction novels not only to evoke authentically a particular time and place but also to be accessible and relatable to modern sensibilities by way of the problems that the characters face. In Unsettled author Gay Lynch sets out to do just this, by drawing on some of her own family’s stories and on factual events and persons in the Mt Gambier area of south-east South Australia and Melbourne, in the second half of the nineteenth century while, at the same time, having her characters deal with issues that are very familiar to 21st century Australians.' (Introduction)
'What does it mean to tell the stories of one’s ancestors? How do human beings endure landscapes dominated by scarcity, isolation, gruelling labour, and patriarchal cruelty? And what is the price to be paid for survival?'(Introduction)
