Seven Little Australians

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Seven Little Australians (1912)
by Ethel Turner, illustrated by J. Macfarlane

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[Sixteenth Edition with a special preface by the author. First published 1894. (John Fleming Cullen Macfarlane; 1857-1936) An audiobook is available at Librivox.] A classic Australian children's novel by Ethel Turner. Set mainly in Sydney in the 1880s, it relates the adventures of the seven mischievous Woolcot children, their stern army father Captain Woolcot, and flighty stepmother Esther. The novel was adapted for plays, musical theatre and TV mini-series.

If you imagine you are going to read of model children, with perhaps a naughtily inclined one to point a moral, you had better lay down the book immediately and betake yourself to 'Sandford and Merton.' Not one of the seven is really good, for the very excellent reason that Australian children never are. …

Ethel TurnerJ. Macfarlane2193490Seven Little Australians1912

"Everyone fetched some offering to lay at Judy's shrine for a keepsake"

SEVEN LITTLE
AUSTRALIANS

By
ETHEL TURNER

(MRS. CURLEWISS)
Author of "The Family at Misrule," "The Little Larrikins," etc.

Illustrated by J. Macfarlane

WARD, LOCK & CO., LIMITED
LONDON, MELBOURNE AND TORONTO
1912

To
MY MOTHER

TO MY READERS

My Publishers have asked me to add a preface to this sixteenth edition of my first book. What is it I should say?

Suppose you knew a child—not a well-behaved one by any means; just a rough little everyday boy with tousled hair and ungramattical tongue. And suppose this lad in some way introduced you to a wide circle of valued and delightful friends and set your feet in the path of a career that brought you, not only good fortune but many gratifications of an innocent vanity. The probabilities are that you would feel very kindly to such a youngster and would not investigate too closely his actual merits.

That, at any rate, is my attitude to "Seven Little Australians," and in reading it over I have preferred to allow some imperfections to remain, rather than to alter them, just as I should refrain from too sedulous an endeavour to correct the faults of the well-meaning tousled little person whose good offices I have imagined above.

"Ethel Turner."

Mosman,
Sydney,
February, 1912

The longest-living author of this work died in 1958, so this work is in the public domain in countries and areas where the copyright term is the author's life plus 65 years or less. This work may be in the public domain in countries and areas with longer native copyright terms that apply the rule of the shorter term to foreign works.

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