It should also be noted that the manuscript contains the retelling of a story from an Aboriginal man, Tettawonga. Turner provides a contemporary account of late Victorian family discipline, and also of the expression of love in an Australian family. Readers are able to identify their own childhood experiences and parental failings in what she wrote. One of its many endearing qualities is that, in Turner’s words, the children are “not really good.” She sketched the intricacies of the family unit and included the challenges, joys and misadventures. Its 182 pages focus on seven siblings growing up in Australia with an authoritarian father and a young and very busy stepmother. Seven Little Australians is regarded as a classic of Australian nineteenth-century literature. Turner also broke the mould of Australian writing which had usually reflected British ideas about Australia and Australians, by her evocation of life in the suburbs of Sydney, with the characters enjoying the resources and attractions an established city offered. Seven Little Australians was the first work of family fiction to portray Australian life in an authentically Australian voice, and the first Australian children’s book to feature a girl as the hero, thus contributing to the foundation of girls’ literature in Australia. It marked a turning point in Australian children’s literature.
The original 1983 manuscript is the tangible embodiment of Turner’s creative process, which produced one of Australia’s most iconic pieces of literature. An instant success, it sold five thousand copies in Australia in its first year of publication, and over two million copies to date. Ethel Turner’s Seven Little Australians, first published in 1894, has been in print longer than any other Australian children’s book and was the first to be translated into a foreign language.
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