Mo Burdekin — Sarah Campion

The wet came that year with a cock-eye bob; loud thunder, ragged streams of lightning and a wind of a awful fury...Now there was nothing in the whole wide river but tossing water, uprooted trees, a few bandicoots and kangaroo rats feebly struggling still, and an old wooden cradle carved with grapes and acanthus leaves in which a dirty brown baby sat drooling with bubbles at his mouth, snatching at the twigs and flowing grass-heads as he floated onwards, southwards, on the broad tossing breast of Burdekin. So begins the life of Mo Burdekin, washed ashore into the arms of the riverside shopkeeper, Reuben Abraham. Reuben, in all Hebraic honesty, can name the waif nothing but Moses Burdekin. This novel evokes the struggling lives of North Queensland in the late nineteenth century.