Quotes from Ethel Turner

None of the seven is really good, for the excellent reason that Australian children never are.

and then ah God

But in Australia a model child is - I sasy it not without thankfulness - an unknown quantity. It may be that the miasmas of naughtiness develop best in the sunny brilliancy of our atmosphere. It may be that the land and the people are so young-hearted together, and the children's spirits are not crushed and saddened by the shadow of long years' sorrowful history. There is a lurking sparkle of joyousness and rebellion and mischief in nature here, and therefore in children.

But again and again that night there came to him Meg's white, still face as it lay on the scarlet cushions, and he knew the wind that stirred the curtains at the window had been playing with the long grass in the churchyard a few minutes since.

The mother had taken the visitors' room to sleep in ever since the day two months ago when Death had walked whitely into that larger room and frozen with his strange breath the father of her youngest child.

There was no sound anywhere. No twitter of wakening birds in the gum trees, no bleat from the sandy paddocks, no low of far-off cattle. Silence - the frightful silence of Drought that has killed all life and now broods over the place aghast at her own handiwork.

By polygons I mean,' said Judy, 'that a question is not a figure with one side only. It is a cube, a heptagon, an octagon. You and I see just one side of a thing and jump to the doing of it. We must learn to walk around the five or the seven or the eight sides it may have and study each before we move an inch.

But you, warm from the hearts of all those sisters and brothers - oh go back to them and be poor and happy and grow up in the healthy atmosphere of 'give and take' instead of our most wretched one of 'keep'.

Meg had grown older; she would never be quite so young again as she had been before that red sunset sank into her soul. There was a deeper light in her eyes; such tears as she had wept clear the sight till life becomes a thing more distinct and far-reaching.

Quite a warm friendship had sprung up during the month between the little fair-faced girl, who looked with such serene blue eyes to a future she felt must be beautiful, and the world-worn man, who looked back to a past all blackened and unlovely by his own acts.

Australian girls nearly always begin to think of 'lovers and nonsense', as middlefolks call it, long before their English aged sisters do... And herein lies the chief defect of the very young Australian girl. She is like a peach; a beautiful, smooth, rich peach, that has come to ripeness, almost in a day, and that hastens to rub off the soft, delicate bloom that is its chief charm, just to show its bright, warm colouring more clearly.