The Art Deco Mansion in St Lucia

St Lucia, the Brisbane suburb famed for its university campus, emerged despite world wars, Spanish Influenza and Depression. In the 1950s, kangaroos hopped across open paddocks; snakes slithered through scrub. The sanitary cart, ice man, milkman and whistle-tooting postman traversed rutted dirt roads to service the community. And, each morning, sun-warmed milk churned the stomachs of the students at Ironside State School.

Then, as bold new scaffolding reached for the sky, people watched, amazed, and asked Who could build this huge mansion-with an elevator in it-amid post war building constraints?

In this St Lucia setting, a wide-eyed child of the outback overcame her terror of big schools, big cities, and big universities. A man of vision, faith and love inspired Ruth to rise above such challenges.

This is the story of her grandfather. The third book of Ruth Back Bonetti's Midnight Sun to Southern Cross trilogy gives his own voice from interviews and voluminous correspondence, to answer the question: What drove this Migrant-Made-Good?

Ruth Bonetti is a third generation Finland Swede Australian who grew up in the arid Queensland outback, intrigued by the strange-accented relatives she met on holidays near Byron Bay and on visits to 'The Big House' in St Lucia. She preferred Mozart to hillbilly music, books to horses. Ruth's gift for classical music became a passport to the world. Destiny led her to live in Sweden, directly across the Gulf of Bothnia from her grandfather's birthplace in Finland, where she researched the stories told in this trilogy. Ruth is author/editor of a dozen publications about music, education and performance, five through Words and Music and two with Oxford University Press. She is a Fellow of the Migration Institute of Finland where she presented a conference paper in 2014, published in 'Participation, Integration, and Recognition: Changing Pathways to Immigrant Incorporation'. Ruth Bonetti has published in the Institute quarterly journal, 'Siirtolaisuus-Migration Quarterly'.