Queensland Cousins

Four children of a sugar planter grow up three hundred feet above a valley in North Queensland, far enough from neighbours that a parcel from England counts as an event. The fourteen-year-old twins Nesta and Eustace, ten-year-old Peter and toddler Becky get a night robbery, a false alarm with a revolver, and at last their aunt Dorothy Chase, sent out from Herefordshire to recover from typhoid. Then the family sails for England, the ship goes down off the coast, and the survivors reach Maze Court as strangers among polished cousins who think them wild. Haverfield published this in 1908 for young readers, and it carries the racial language of Edwardian settler Australia: Aboriginal people and Asian plantation labourers appear only through fearful colonial stereotype.