Good story. Chock full of Australian history. As an American, I don't know how accurate the history is, but I have seen Rabbit Proof Fence and documentaries on Australia...the history feel accurate. The book ends a little abruptly and with a HEA that I wasn't expecting. ( )

A wonderful story that starts out with a major happening. You get to fall in love with the characters second to a death that changes and begins it all... ( )

Australian outback of Queensland in the 1930s. Emma McKenna awakes before dawn to the sound of cars approaching the family home on her father’s, Captain McKenna’s, station. They are to be evicted only he refuses to go. Quickly the men move in and in the ensuing chaos, shots are fired and Capt. McKenna lies dead “penniless and dispossessed in a hail of gunfire.”

In Dickensian melodrama, Emma’s fortunes spiral downward, forcing her to first seek refuge with her skinflint uncle by marriage. Later she must put her paralyzed mother into a home and her younger twin brothers into a Catholic brother’s farm/orphanage where they are abused and one commits suicide. She has a passing sexual relationship with Stephen, the scion of a powerful family, who is involved with the fascist movement called the New Guard and gets himself in trouble when an armory guard is murdered during what was to have been a simple gun running raid. He’s forced into a loveless marriage, ignorant of Emma’s new pregnancy.

Through travails, her involvement with union and communist protests against abusive work rules, Emma begins to pull herself up by her bootstraps. Not everyone is allied against her and she receives support from Stephen’s uncle.

The book is not gracefully written, but the characters are believable and the history of Australia of the time and the Spanish Civil War where many Australians went to escape the Depression and to fight and die is informative. Most painful to read is the treatment the Aboriginal population suffered from white Australian landowners. Very reminiscent of Southern slave holders’ behavior to their black slaves. Still, not a book I’d recommend as it is not an artistically satisfying work on any level. ( )