Cirrus@Austlit

'Here is a novel of exiles seeking an unattainable home, amid them conceivably a first Australian woman painter, Jerusha Braddon. Daughter of a lighthouse keeper on the Shipwreck Coast, she grows up on an island, her companion a convict's son, her talent shaped by her parents' conflicts and her grandmother's fantasies. As the New World takes shape around her in its kindness and cruelty, she creates vivid, original seascapes and bush scenes until, attacked by a posse hunting Aboriginals, her works become a passionate demand for justice.'  (Publication summary)