The Wonder-Child by Ethel Turner

The Wonder-Child Reviews

• 
  Brona's Books

  The Wonder Child is a gentle juvenile story about a family forced to be separated for years due to the gifted talents of one of the children. Challis plays the piano like a dream and goes off to Europe with her mother to make the family fortune.
  
  The other four children stay at home with their hapless, but lovable father. Mr Cameron is a dreamer. He struggles to make his way in life, preferring to write verses, compose melodies and paint pictures. He doesn't seem to have the necessary skills to hold down a job and he relies on his more practical, responsible wife to manage their finances. Mrs Cameron obviously loves her creative husband, but also has to live with his flaws on a daily basis. After five children, and constantly being forced to ask family and friends for help, a job is arranged for Cameron in western NSW as a Crown Land Agent.
  
  Wilgandra is a fictional town, but it sounds just like most of the small country towns I've known. Turner tells us it is -
  three hundred and seventy-three miles back, back, away in the heart of the country - the farthest town to which the Government sent its Land Agent....
  The climate was intolerable in the summer, there was little or no society, the only house they could have was not over comfortable.
  
  It doesn't sound particularly promising or inspiring.
  
  After their mother goes off to Europe with Challis, Hermie, Bartie, Roly & Floss are cared for by a very competent female 'lady-help' and their State girl Lizzie, carefully selected by Mrs Cameron before she left. However this arrangement only lasts six months, until the very competent young woman is snapped up by a local romeo to be his wife.
  
  Hermie and Lizzie attempt to run the household, until even Mr Cameron is forced to acknowledge that this isn't working properly. Along comes the gentle, ineffectual Miss Browne. She's a spinster who has been unable to hold down any other job and whose ways are even more hapless than Mr Cameron.
  
  A gradual decline sets in. Compounded by Mr Cameron losing his job as a Land Agent.
  
  The family is forced to move out of the home the state provided, to take up possession of a lean, mean selection out of town.
  Their father's selection stretched before them, eighty acres of miserable land, lying grey and dreary under the canopy of a five o'clock coppery sky, summer and drought time.
  
  Five years drag on...five years of disguising their misfortunes from Mrs Cameron and Challis, until the day the letter arrives confirming the date they are due home from Europe. A Europe of adoration, comfort, new clothes and fine lodgings.
  
  I don't normally provide a summary of the story in my posts, but this is one of Turner's lesser known works and I felt it deserved a fuller treatment.
  
  Although this could be classified as a children's book, the themes are wide ranging and topical (for 1901).
  Full review here -
  http://bronasbooks.blogspot.com/2019/...
• 
  J.

  The story of an Australian family. The father is very absent minded, artistic, and dreamy. The mother keeps everything in order and prevents the family from starving and helps her husband stay employed. When their middle child is discovered to be a musical genius on the piano, the mother and the child go away for what is supposed to be a short trip that turns into years of training and performing all over Europe. The story focuses on what happens to the family left at home and how they survive, sort of. There is a little about the Boeher (?) War that I didn't know much about and had me reading other sources to find out why it was such a big deal in Australia.