Southern Cross (0)

Trama

On a soft October evening in 1802, on the lawn before the Government House, eighteen-year-old Susannah King stands watching a French corvette under topsails as it moves slowly into that noblest of harbors, Sydney Cove. In this enchanted and forever-remember hour, the governor's daughter awaits the returning Post-Captain Nicholas Baudin. He is her first lover and she is to be his last, but the echoes of their encounter will ring with deepening tones through the lives of many others, and through the first turbulent decades of the Australian nation-to-be.

From the first Botany Bay convict settlers to the Ballarat gold-field riots of 1854, this is the moving narrative of Susannah and of her sons-the sensitive Robert, a lawyer who comes home from London with a not quite-fashionable sympathy for the oppressed, and his entrepreneur stepbrother, John Redfern, who places his desire for power above the bonds of his family and the needs of his country. It is also the story of a succession of Australian governors, including the famous Bligh, of the Bounty; of Tyrone, the sadistic jailer; of Jane, who is trapped in a country that brings her only tragedy but that she cannot help loving. And it is the saga of George Bryant, transported from England for stealing a Bishop's cloak, and of the cloak itself and how it is one day transformed into the nation's first embattled flag, emblazoned with the constellation Crux - the Southern Cross.

When at the end of her long life Susannah stands looking out over the harbor once more, we have seen a nation being born and have known with rare intensity the men and women who peopled the drama.