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Ethel Turner(1870 - 1958)
Before you fairly start this story I should like to give you just a word of warning. 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 youself to Sandford and Merton, or similar standard juvenile works. Not one of the seven is really good, for the very excellent reason that Australian children never are. In England, and America, and Africa, and Asia, the little folks may be paragons of virtue -- I know little about them. But in Australia a model child is -- I say it not without thankfulness -- an unknown quantity. It may be that the miasmas of naughtiness develop best in the sunny brilliance of our atmosphere. It may be that the land and the people are young-hearted together, and the children's spirits not crushed and saddened by the shadow of long years' sorrowful hsitory. There is a lurking sparkle of joyousness and rebellion and mischief in nature here, and therefore in children.
From Seven Little Australians by Ethel Turner, 1894
