AustLit

Grace Longden emigrates to Melbourne from England after her father's financial ruin and suicide. She stays in a Fitzroy boarding house until her aunt arrives to take her to her country station near Camperdown in Victoria's west, when she meets her cousins. Tom proposes to her almost immediately and rescues her from a runaway horse - but she reveals an earlier engagement made in England. Tom's handsome younger brother Jim also proposes and is rejected. News of her English suitor's marriage to another frees her to follow her heart and marry Tom. Australian openness and relaxed manners, courtship and hospitality are linked to the blue skies and beauty of the landscape and contrasted with the colder but pretty equivalents in England. (PB)