Cirrus@Austlit

Dedication: 'To the Orkney settlers, driven from their home island of Eday in the North Sea, who set out a hundred years ago to build new homes for themselves and their children in the Land Down Under.'

Author's Foreword: 'In the middle of the last century there was an emigration from the island of Eday in the Orkneys to the new land down under. The story is told that the Eday laird, stung by a taunt at the small size of his holdings, vowed he would alter them. He therefore evicted twenty families from their tiny crofts to make for himself the fine farm of Greentoft, still in existence. There was then no law in Britain that could be invoked against him, and, in the face of bitter feeling, the twenty families were driven out. Among those dispossessed were the Reids about whose beautiful daughter, Barbara, this story centers.'