Up the Country

Recounts the experiences of the Mazeres, Pooles, and Brennans, three Australian pioneer families, in the 1840s and 1850s

Australian author Franklin, known chiefly in America for the charming My Brilliant Career, wrote other novels under various pseudonyms. As "Brent of Bin Bin," she used her grandmother's tales of the families who settled Australia to form the novel Up the Country (1928), now reissued in edited form with an author's note. The lives of the Mazere, Poole and Brennan families from the late 1840s to the mid '50s are chronicled with the garrulous extravagance and didactic naivete that is Franklin's characteristic style. A pioneering feminist herself, the author focuses on strong women, particularly the matriarchs: Mrs. Mazere, of good stock, generous with her neighbors, and Mrs. Brennan, her counterpart, accepted despite her Irish-Catholic ancestry. The growth of the numerous children, their orchestrated courtships and marriages, and the close ties of the families to their land are well described by the observant Franklin, who shows the yarns of the old hands "up the country" to be living history made by people in flight from their past.
Copyright 1987 Reed Business Information, Inc.