The story of a pair of 20th-century sisters provides the scaffolding for Keneally's epic fictional exploration of Australian history. Prue and Dimp Bettany, orphaned at a young age, are trying to find their place in the world in the 1980s. Betrayed in love, Prim takes off to become an aid worker in Sudan. Meanwhile, back in Oz, Dimp, a film producer with one hit under her belt, has settled into domesticity. Then an acquaintance with a penchant for old books and documents comes across a journal written by the girls' ancestor, Jonathan Bettany, while he was carving out a life for himself as a sheep farmer in the then Virgin land of New South Wales. Occasionally you do feel as though you are being bludgeoned with histor ical detail, nonetheless this is a compelling book, not just because it is brave and ambitious and Keneally is accomplished enough to pull it off, but because his humanity makes him a trustworthy guide on this journey through the past and into the present on two continents.
