David Hunt

Her father's drunk.

Her mother was well-born, but made the mistake of marrying for love and now is living out this nightmarish existence and taking it out on her kids.

At some point, Sibylla is invited to her grandmother's house and her beautiful, elegant aunt Helen is there.

Helen also made the mistake of marrying for love and her bounder husband basically just deserted her.

So she had to return home to the shame of a life of a deserted wife.

And she's very...

keen that Sibylla doesn't make the same mistake.

But what happens to Sibylla is that she's introduced to the world of art and literature and ideas and paintings and beauty and piano music and

conversation and dancing and the art of, you know, middle class, upper middle class Australian society, which she clearly knew existed because she'd learned of it from her mother, but not had tasted it.

And so there's this exquisitely cruel period of her life in this book where she's living an absolute dream.

And it's a wonderful picture of

Australian middle class life on the land and the gentry and the, I mean, we have to also say it's horrendously racist and also just brutally classist as well, this book.

But it's a great evocation of the bloom of life when things are good.

And lack of personal insight, I think, as well.

Yes, yes, perhaps.

A person who really does not know herself or what is in front of her.

It's frustrating.

Oh, what about Mrs. Meswat?

She's happy with her lot, with all her children, her beautiful children, her handsome husband, so she thinks, even though he's a dirty, dirty man, he doesn't wash.

But anyway, she seemed to be the only one who was genuinely happy.