Unsettled

The unsettled South Australian frontier near Mount Gambier is a strange and difficult place for a Galway family trying to make sense of their new world. Rosanna and brother Skelly long to escape.  

Their older brother Edwin races against poets in steeplechases and schemes over cattle, carts and cards to get ahead. They are all half in love with a visiting priest and a disturbing Irish play about their ancestors.

When she goes to work at a nearby station, Rosanna is caught up in a string of events—throwing a horserace, the allure of a visiting actor, violent threats to her Boandik friends, and the wreck of the Admella—that lead to a reckoning with the land, its histories, its religions and its ancient and recent cultures.  

Unsettled is fearless and exuberant, playful and erudite, an Australian classic in the making.

‘Passionate and uncompromising … brilliantly evoking the complexities of early Australian settlement.’ — Danielle Clode

‘Spellbinding historical fiction, offering fresh insight into a 19th-century past which unsettles our present.’ — Laura Bloom