Barra Creek

By Di Morrissey

Book Overview

An outback family saga that will knock your hat off. It's funny, poignant and completely unexpected. You won't be able to stop thinking about it. Di's twelfth novel opens in New Zealand in the 1960s. The Mitchell family has run a prosperous sheep farm for generations and the youngest daughter, Sally, has just turned 20. She rides to the hounds and leads an indulged life. That is, until she shocks her parents by becoming involved with an older man. Scandalised, they try to pack her off to England, but Sally doesn't make it. After a wild spree in Sydney she's cashed in her ticket and, hell bent on adventure, takes a job as a governess on a remote cattle station - Barra Creek - in the Gulf country of Cape York. Untamed and crocodile infested, it's a land of deserts, jungles and wide rivers. Then the great stations were run by men who were loners and women who had to cope or leave. Decades later, in 2003, Sally learns a secret that will change many lives - including her own - and leave readers horrified on one hand, and smiling and crying on the other.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1250053269
• ISBN13: 9781250053268
• Release Date: November 2003
• Publisher: St. Martins Press-3PL
• Length: 456 Pages
• Weight: 1.08 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.0" x 5.0" x 8.0"

Customer Reviews

GOVERNESS AT AN OUTBACK CATTLE STATION

There is a cattle station - Barra Creek - in the wild Gulf country of North West Queensland of Australia on a tributary of the crocodile-infested Norman River. Sally Mitchel impulsively takes a job as a governess at Barra Creek. Hundreds of miles from any town and no contact except the mail plane, The Flying Doctor and the School of the Air. The children have to use every day as there is no school except by radio and home tutoring by the governess. Her boss is overpowering John Monroe and his strict and proper wife Lorna. John Monroe late at night often wanders down to the aboriginal stockmans camp to join them for drinks around a camp fire. The white women are told to never come near at night time, as its not safe. Sally sleeps on the verandah in the unbearable heat with the three young boys. The boys put a snake in her shoes, play awful pranks on her to scare her away in the beginning.It used to work scaring off all the other governesses. But Sally is determined to stay she has nowhere else to go. The challenges of her three charges, wild stockmen, the heat and the wet, a great passion, cattle musters all fade compared to a great loss and a gruesome death. An Outback Family Saga you won't be able to stop thinking about when you are finished. This story would make a wonderful movie.