Overview

'Where the Wild Black Swans are Flying' is an historical novel set in Western Australia's Swan River Colony in the in the first years of white settlement. Becky Lees arrived in the new colony as a baby. She is the child of indentured servants, bound to work for seven years for their master. Conditions in the colony had improved by the time she was seven, but her mother was still cooking on an open fire in a bush shed, with tragic results. When her father also dies in a bullock-wagon accident far from white settlements, Becky is rescued by indigenous Noongar people and travels with them for some months, before being taken in by Meg Kenyon, a widow struggling to be self-sufficient on a remote farm, where they live on fish, and the vegetables and fruit they grow. The hardships she and Meg face, and overcome, reflect realities overlooked in novels about the colonial gentry. Fate has more trauma in store for Becky but, against the odds, she finally finds happiness.

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Lynne Cairns is a Western Australian author and historian. While working as a graphic designer and fine artist, she completed a degree and a post graduate diploma in history, at Murdoch University. This led to employment as an assistant curator at the Western Australian Maritime Museum.While there, she researched and wrote Fremantle's Secret Fleets: Allied submarines based in Western Australia during World War II (WA Museum, 1995), and co-wrote (with Graeme Henderson) Unfinished Voyages: Western Australian Shipwrecks 1881-1900, (UWA Press, 1995). An expanded and updated edition of Fremantle's Secret Fleets was published in 2012 as Secret Fleets: Fremantle's World War II Submarine Base (Western Australian Museum, 2012).After leaving the Museum, she completed a Master of Arts degree. Her dissertation, 'Women's Work in the Swan River Colony, 1829-1850' researched the role of women in the early settlement of Western Australia.This interest is reflected in her historical novels Where Wild Black Swans are Flying, and (for young readers) Cast Away. Her latest novel, soon to be published, is a mystery set in 1890s Western Australia, in the goldrush town that was to become Kalgoorlie.Ms. Cairns lives in Western Australia with her husband. She enjoys researching history, writing fiction and poetry, and art.

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