Timeless land. Eleanor Dark. 1989.

First published in 1941, Eleanor Dark’s classic novel of the early settlement of Australia is a story of hardship, mutiny, savagery and danger. Above all, it is the story of conflict: of the Aborigines and the coming of the white settlers.

Often the settlers were almost starving, but as time passed, ships from home brought more of civilisation. But the sense of conflict remained. Behind the veneer of British civilisation lay the baffling presence of Australia itself, a timeless land that shared with England ‘not even its seasons or its stars’.