In this investigation of the life and varied careers of True Davidson, Eleanor Darke seeks to discover what can be "truly said about True" – a fascinating and contradictory woman who was always ahead of her time."There was no quitter in her make-up and she fought like a banshee for whatever she believed in – which was people, truth, Canada. People either loved her or loathed her. None was indifferent. All her life True Davidson stood for human values. And traditions. Her courage an...

An outstanding literary achievement, meticulously researched and deeply felt, this portrait of the earliest days of the European settlement of Australia remains unrivalled.the year 1788: the very beginning of European settlement. these were times of hardship, cruelty and danger. Above all, they were times of conflict between the Aborigines and the white settlers.Eleanor Dark brings alive those bitter years with moments of tenderness and conciliation amid the brutality and hostility....

Book two of The Timeless Land trilogy, The Storm of Time continues Eleanor Dark's sweeping saga of colonial Sydney under governors Hunter, King and Bligh.Sydney Cove, 1799, and three years since Governor Phillip departed. Against a background of continuing convict settlement, hunger, rebellion and the terrifying force of a barely understood land, the saga of Ellen Prentice and the Mannion family continues. Stephen Mannion marries the lovely Conor Moore and brings her back for Ellen ...

Book three of The Timeless Land trilogy, Eleanor Dark's best known work, continues the story of colonial Sydney up to the crossing of the Blue Mountains.the story of the Mannion family continues after the Bligh rebellion. As the young Mannions grow to maturity, so too the settlement at Sydney Cove develops into a town of substance. And later, the longings of young Miles Mannion are echoed in the efforts of the settlers to spread to the west. the discovery of a route over the Blue Mo...

Published in 1934 and regarded as Australia's first modernist novel, Prelude to Christopher covers four days following a car crash where a doctor is critically injured, and the women around him struggle with their hopes, inhibitions and knowledge.'...perfectly captures the feeling of the subterranean horror which flows silently under everyday life' - The Penguin New Literary History of Australia

Eleanor Dark's last book, a beautifully observed study of life in a small town. 'We have lived round the corner from the world, with not even a signpost to betray our whereabouts... and if the treasure we have accumulated makes no show upon our bank statements, neither is it subject to income tax.' Lantana, bushy and massive, is Australia's most uncontrollable tropical weed. Inland from the Pacific coast, where the pineapple plantations grow, sprawls the lantana in all its luxuriance. Here...

It is 1941 and the storm clouds of war gather over Australia. In the mountains outside Sydney the Massey family are reunited by their father's death. Gilbert is a successful novelist, struggling with writer's block in middle age. A socialist and intellectual, he shares his political understanding - and fears - with his sister Marty and Marxist brother Nick. But he is locked in an unhappy marriage with a woman of little imagination and obsessive respectability, and their daughters, Prue and...

It is difficult for Todmorden Mills Museum visitors to imagine that this site so close to the busy Don Valley Parkway was once home to an important mill. As early as 1793 Governor Simcoe recognized the industrial potential of this portion of the Don River. By 1795 Skinner’s sawmill was under construction, initiating an era of technological development that spread beyond the valley of the Don into what was then Muddy York. Today, Todmorden serves to remind us of Toronto’s industrial heritag...

Set in the 1930s, Return to Coolami is the story of a two-day motor car trip from Sydney, across the Blue Mountains to the country property, Coolami.For each of the occupants of the shiny green Madison tourer, it becomes an interior journey: Susan and Bret, recently bound together in a marriage which seems to have little future, painfully grope towards some understanding of the events that have brought them together; Susan's parents contemplate their thirty-seven years of ...

First published in 1941, Eleanor Dark's classic novel of the early settlement of Australia is a story of hardship, cruelty and danger. Above all it is the story of conflict: between the Aborigines and the white settlers. In this dramatic novel, a large cast of characters, historical and fictional, black and white, convict and settler, brings alive those bitter years with moments of tenderness and conciliation amid the brutality and hostility. All the while, behind the veneer of British civ...

The sensational novel that shocked Australia...Come in Spinner won the 1948 Daily telegraph novel competition. It was first published in an abridged edition in 1951, as the subject matter - including rape, abortion and prostitution - was considered too controversial for the time. Even so, the book was an immediate sensation, with bookshops in both Sydney and Brisbane sold out within days.Set in a beauty salon at the Hotel South Pacific in wartime Sydney, i...

A tormented and humiliated mixed-race Australian man reaches his breaking point and takes terrifying revenge on his abusers in this critically acclaimed novel based on actual eventsIn Australia at the turn of the twentieth century, Jimmie Blacksmith is desperate to figure out where he belongs. Half-Anglo and half-Aboriginal, he feels out of place in both cultures. Schooled in the ways of white society by a Protestant missionary, Jimmie forsakes tribal customs, adopt...