The Dreaming: A Novel of Australia

In 1871, a ship sails into Melbourne Harbor, bringing Joanna Drury to Australia. She has come to find property left to her by her mother - and also to trace mysterious aspects of her mother's past, a past that has begun to haunt Joanna's life and dreams. Joanna meets the fascinating Hugh Westbrook, whose sheep station, Merinda, is developing into a vast frontier empire, and she falls deeply in love with him. But increasingly her life is plagued by peculiar reversals; Joanna notices that Aborigines react to her in strange ways. With the help of a young native girl named Sarah, Joanna begins to delve into Australia's past and to search out the tragic events that have marked her family's destiny, and her own life - events that happened long ago, back in the time the Aborigines call "the dreaming".