AustLit

'Fleeing Kuala Lumpur after the Japanese capture Penang, young Zeny Havilland arrives in Darwin shortly before Christmas 1941. Uprooted and knowing no one, she finds work as a reporter on the Northern Standard and a home with Olive, a gentle Quaker who takes in waifs and strays. Robert, a troubled young man damaged by war, lives in a shed in the garden.

'The Japanese army's advance into the Pacific seems unstoppable and Australia a probable target. Amid the growing tensions in a frontier town unprepared for Japanese attack, Zeny and Robert fall in love and face with courage not only the threat of invasion but their fear that Robert's personal demons will destroy their future together.'

Source: Publisher's blurb.

''Here,' he shouted, 'here is a daughter of the working class. Not your idle rich dressed in silks and satins. She has to work every day. Tell them what you think of capitalism,' he insisted, still gripping my hand. 'Tell them what it's like to be a poor woman in grinding employment.'

'In the violent and despairing years of Australia's Great Depression, Judith Larsen grows up on a coaling hulk in the Port Adelaide River. The Australian political landscape is changing and unemployment, hunger, protests and police reprisals spawn new radical ideas for managing society.

'Judith falls in love with Harry, an idealistic dreamer who embraces the dogma of the Communist Party while she flourishes as a satirical cartoonist. Political tensions rise between them but when Harry's life is threatened Judith embarks on a perilous journey across the world to save him. In doing so she comes face to face with the cruelty and oppression of fascism and the importance of those who fight against it.

'Drawn from family recollections and based on historical events, this powerful Australian novel tells of brave people caught up in the inspiration and the pity of great but lost causes.' (Publication summary)

'An Original Talent is complete in itself. But it is also the third novel in the trilogy about high-spirited Jerusha Braddon and her gallant struggle to survive as an independent woman painter in the 1870s Melbourne. It follows Fishing for Strawberries and Jerusha Braddon, Painter.

'The art dealer Peter Larchy has launched her first exhibition and she is elated at having dared to thrust in the public's eye a painting of a nude prostitute and a portrait of her murdered friend Christine. But her originality scandalises bringing social rejection, poverty and estrangement from her fiancé John. In love with Peter Larchy, she yet fears that marriage to him could destroy her independence as a painter. She asks herself if married women painted and admits despairingly, 'I knew none that did.'

'To avoid starving, she sketches passers-by in Bourke Street for two shillings. Torn between her timidities and her daring, she remains undaunted in her passion to create paintings that are groundbreaking and unique.

'And finally she courageously makes a decision about marriage.' (From the publisher's website.)

'For Jerusha Braddon, only daughter of a lighthouse keeper and a gifted young painter, Melbourne in the last third of the nineteenth century should have been the zenith of her dreams. But hemmed in by poverty, dependence and inhibiting social conventions, she must instead confront the limitations of what women artists are permitted to do and to paint. When a reviewer comments on her painting Bushfire over Melbourne that the ferocity of its subject matter and its raw energy is unsuitable for a woman painter, she despairs of the suffocating situation.

'Forbidden as a woman to enter life classes, she takes an unusual and original step. She is supported in her unconventional choice by a cynical Collins Street art dealer, Peter Larchy, and more dangerously by capricious reckless, beautiful Christine, her future sister-in-law. The consequences of her actions are unforeseen and both tragedy and triumph follow.' (Publication summary)

'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)

'It is 1916. The Australian community is riven over a referendum to conscript more troops for the killing fields of Europe. Nine-year-old Matthew's family, divided politically and sinking into poverty, reflects the social conflict. Handsome, generous Edward is at the centre of the family friction. Gran hates the war as Edward does, Mother flirts with him to escape the misery of her marriage, and young Matthew adores him.

'As patriotic frenzy takes hold, police informers spy on Edward and track his anti-conscription activities. Sabotage and anarchism are meaningless words to Matthew. Absorbed in childhood fantasies, he is unaware that he too is helping draw the net around Edward. It is left to Matthew's German headmaster to teach him that, like music, people grow with love.' (Publication summary)