Rat-Wife: If you had, it would be such a pleasure to rid your worships’ house of them.

Rat-Wife: Humbly begging pardon – are your worships troubled with any gnawing things in the house? ‘A perfect Woman, nobly planned,/To warn, to comfort, and command.’. Bolinda (Audiobook – read by Deidre Rubenstein, 2019).Royal Victorian Institute for the Blind (Audiobook, 1985, read by Katherine Mundy).Hear-a-Book (Audiobook, 1983, read by Anne Fraser).Claassen (Kurt Heinrich Hansen, German, 1982, Der Lendenschurz).Gallimard (France 1981, Jean Lambert, Une Ceinture de feuilles).Penguin (AU 1977, 365pp – reprinted fourteen times in as many years).Jonathan Cape (UK, September 1976, 405pp).Have they lost who they once were? Gained something new and complex? Or are they now lost somewhere in between? He too feels transformed from his former English self. Ellen leaves with a merchant for Sydney for the return voyage to England. When at last she is returned to society, Ellen is a figure part-traumatised, part-awakened. Now confronted by these two very different types of lifestyle to her own, she is sent on a journey of self-discovery. Taken in by the native tribe that killed the men, she is forced to become part of this society, reduced to wearing a fringe of leaves around her waist which conceals her only remaining possession: her wedding ring.īut amidst the clamour and the clangour, Ellen meets a white convict who escaped some time ago and has taken to living with the natives. One of the two lifeboats crashes on an island off the coast of what is now Queensland. Ellen tragically suffers a miscarriage on board, but this is only the beginning of her trials. But on the planned journey back home, a shipwreck turns the voyage into a disaster. Mr and Mrs Austin, the latter now a refined lady, journey to the Australian colonies, where they visit Van Diemen’s Land (Tasmania) and Sydney, taking in the societal landscape. Plot: Ellen Gluyas, a poor Cornish girl in the 19 th century, makes good when she marries the invalid Mr Austin. “There are conventions in truth as in anything else.” Sidney Nolan, Daisy Bates at Ooldea (1950)

A Fringe of Leaves by Patrick White