About the Book

In 1881 ‘Big Jim’ Durham, an English soldier of fortune and profiteer,

ruthlessly creates for Elianne Desmarais, his young French wife, the finest

of the great sugar mills of the Southern Queensland cane fields, and names

it in her honour.

The massive estate becomes a self-sufficient fortress, a cane-consuming

monster and home to hundreds of workers, but ‘Elianne’ and its masters, the

Durham family, have dark and distant secrets — secrets that surface in the

wildest and most inflammatory of times, the 1960s . . .

For Kate Durham and her brothers, Neil and Alan, freedom is the

catchword of the decade. Young Australians leap to the barricades of the

social revolution. Rock ‘n’ roll, the pill, the Vietnam War, the rise of

feminism, Asian immigration and the Freedom Ride join forces to rattle the

chains of traditional values.

The workers leave the great sugar estates as mechanisation lessens the

need for labour — and the Durham family, its secrets exposed, begins its

fall from grace . . .

OceanofPDF.com