In fairness, this un-famous, un-noteworthy book taught me far more than just about sheep farming in Australia during Victorian times- I learned about the serving class and the colonizer class, and also about love.
I think this was the first book I read which took place in Australia- all I knew about Australia before reading it was Magwitch and the convicts. This book taught me that Britain didn't just send its convicts to Australia, but more generally the unwanted, the poor and the friendless. It also solidified my hatred of rich people. (yesallrichpeople)
Tori was an orphan who used her father's last five guineas to buy herself a passage to Australia, to escape a life of drudgery in smoky horrible London by going to a life of drudgery on an Australian sheep far, owned by a fairly horrible but not downright villainous English family. The mother and daughter aspire to British genteel upper-class life by painting and playing the piano ("Louisa, you haven't practiced your arpeggios today!") in the bush, while everyone else works very, very hard to manage the sheep and the dingoes and the laundry. The mother sighs. She misses the butterflies in her old English garden, she tells Tori.
Christmas is in hot summer, and Tori faints during the servants' Christmas.
The mother gifts Tori Louisa's old cotton dresses ("sprigged muslin") which are cool, because until she fainted, Tori had to work in the two hot wool dresses she had from London. This causes Louisa to hate Tori, even though she never wore the old dresses. Her mother tells her they have to be kind to servants.
Through a weird series of events, Tori meets, and subsequently falls in love with a neighbouring man, Jake, a rough man with a baby and no wife. She takes leftovers from the big house in a basket to visit the, and they eat together. Jake admires Tori's mouse-brown hair, which glitters in the sunlight, the first time in her life than anyone has admired her. The baby dies from a venomous bite. Tori and Jake comfort each other, and then run off together, sticking it to the man.
The cover of my old paperback showed a girl in a bright pink dress holding a basket, her brown hair piled up in a bun, faced away, towards a log cabin in a very strange forest.
Anyway, I am watching Australian Ghosts these days, and it resurfaced memories of this old book. What a strange melange of class warfare, colonialism, and romance to fill a teenager's brain with!
by 1000andonenites