AustLit

Set in the Australian goldfields of the 1860s -- a world of travelling freak shows, grave robbing, convicts, angels of retribution and Chinese opera -- Fortune tells the story of Chang the 'Tartar Monster'. Eleven years old, 7 feet tall and alone in the world, Chang is enslaved to the cruel Reinhardt, who sells his appearance, at fourpence a time, for souvenir snapshots. Into his life comes Kathleen, Irish, newly free, determined and a passionate survivor. Finally treated as a human being, Chang begins to turn the tables. Showing how readily society's oppressed embrace the role of oppressor. Through richly wrought prose and controlled flights into non-naturalistic realms, Bell probes the complexities of racial prejudice and cultural difference, whilst unsentimentally scrutinising the universal surge for survival (2 acts, 2 men, 3 women).

(Source: Book Depository)

Set in the northern Queensland town of Charters Towers the action takes place over one day in 1957 - the day on which the world's first artificial satellite (the Sputnik) and a symbol of the possibilities of the future is to be seen in the sky over the town. It is also the day during which most of the characters will have to deal with significant and sometimes painful change. The main character, Clivvy, is thirty seven years old and is battling with the past and her inability to leave the town. Having won a sponsorship to go overseas to study piano at age nineteen the war intervened. In the following years many other occurrences deny her a life of her own. It is, however, her sense of being a composer - with her music coming 'out of the underbrush' which gives her the strength she needs.