Shadow Patterns

Penelope Knight can’t escape her past. Each time she runs to a new place and settles into a new life, it eventually happens again. Her world crashes around her and she doesn’t know why. It’s as if she is haunted by a darkness that will never leave her be. Now, motivated by a photograph she sees in a newspaper, Penelope goes in search of a long broken friendship. Her journey takes her from childhood years on a farm in Africa to the inner sect of a cult in modern day Melbourne. Ultimately, the trail leads her to confront betrayal, heartbreak and her most deeply buried secrets. She knows she must face these if she is ever to come out of the shadows and into the light. Shadow Patterns spans two continents and a lifetime of hopes, fears, laughter, regrets, joys and agonies. Take a journey deep into humanity and lose yourself amongst the simple, life-affirming truths of the characters who will become your fellow travellers.

Daphne Tuttle grew up on a dairy farm amongst the sun baked hills and river valleys of South Africa s Eastern Cape. She was sent to boarding school in the historic 1820 Settler city of Grahamstown where, age 12, she wrote and directed a play and decided to be a writer. At 19, Daphne travelled on the back of a motorbike through Southern Africa, seeking fodder for her writing. At 21, she sailed to Europe, worked for a library in London and then went to Bergen, Norway to write. When money ran out, she found a job washing dishes on the cruise ship Meteor and midnight sun cruises, heading further north to Spitsbergen then to the Baltic Sea where in communist Leningrad the crew were fêted while the passengers were ignored. She travelled the Mediterranean and on to the Caribbean, writing and illustrating everything she saw and experienced. Finally, homesick, she declined an officer s stripe offered to remain on Meteor, and boarded a ight that took three days to cross Africa because the plane had to land for each meal.

In Durban everything she owned was stolen, including her precious diaries, and a door seemed to close on her writing. Here she met her Australian husband, Alan, getting married in Grahamstown before sailing for Sydney where she worked at Manly Library and then spent two years in Rabaul, New Guinea. The couple later returned to South Africa, choosing Cape Town in which to re-embrace Africa and raise their two sons. Alan worked for an airline, while Daphne turned her hand to writing a children screenplay for television. In her ongoing quest for spiritual awareness, she joined a cult but, after many years, this ended in a bizarre excommunication. Landing back in the real world with a bump, Daphne found a job in a textile factory, bringing her face to face with some of Cape Town society s very colourful underbelly.

The family returned to Australia some twenty years after Daphne and her new husband had first moved there. In time, they settled on Bribie Island, Queensland, and began running a travel agency amongst the picturesque Glasshouse Mountains. Daphne now committed herself to a path she had never given up on - writing. Travel articles, newsletters, short stories - some featured on local radio - and two novels, Under Pressure and Shadow Patterns, were the creative explorations of her life s experiences and greatest passions: family, spirituality, voyages of discovery, and the personal and cultural complexities of a troubled land. It was an immense satisfaction for her to have completed and published Shadow Patterns shortly before she passed away in 2012.