Bettany's book

About this book

"I was the Englishman overcome with enthusiasm for a barbarous place. I believe that people at Home would have said: this is merely the heathenism which too ripe an alien adventure will raise in the young mind. I was not inhibited by any such reflection. I walked a little way, barefooted, and then lay down in nakedness on loamy earth and began to scoop it up and inhale it. The earth groaned, so I thought, like the beloved, caressed." "So writes John Bettany as he exhilarates in the freedom and wildness of the Australian bush on his journey into the New South Wales of the 1840s. It is thoughts such as these, discovered in his personal journals and in the desperate letters of Sarah Bernard, the convict woman he is destined to meet, that draw the sisters Dimp and Prim Bettany into the adventures of their ancestors one hundred and fifty years later." "Dimp Bettany is a well-known Sydney film producer who, when she discovers the memoirs, is convinced she has finally found her next masterpiece. Prim, an aid-worker in the Sudan who fled Australia following a disastrous love affair, initially resists their pull. But she cannot help becoming intrigued as, through Dimp's correspondence, the story unfolds of how John Bettany carved out a living in virgin territory under the eyes of the aboriginal Moth people, and of Sarah Bernard's internment in the notorious Female Factory, where her only friend was a murderess. As John's and Sarah's paths converge, each sister finds her life cast in a new and galvanising light."--BOOK JACKET.