The Lucky Country - Rose M Cullen - Bog

The Glendon family seek a new home and fortune in The Lucky Country after Patrick's farm in Ireland is bankrupted by a freak storm. Their journey traverses the epic landscape of Australia and their fate collides with a cast of equally lost souls on the vast wheat and sheep station in Western Australia owned by Jack Anderson, a man as tough and ruthless as his pioneering father. Australia in the early 1960's was a world on the brink of change. The Lucky Country strained under its White Australia Policy and was opening up to a greater diversity. Aboriginals had not been viewed as full human beings, one reason why their children were stolen with impunity and herded into missions. The referendum of 1967 at last accorded some level of citizenship. But storyteller, Ben Down, is as uprooted as any of the immigrants he encounters, the ways of his ancestors in his 'Born Country' no longer possible. Stories and memories weave together over the breadth of the twentieth century and one man's luck may be another's misfortune.