Explore "The Call of the Southern Cross, A Romance of Australia" by John Sandes on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
Tom's letters came to Coonara very irregularly, for the mails were few and far between in those days. He wrote that the new settlement at Port Phillip was experiencing a wave of depression, and that many people were leaving the country. He had decided not to take up any land for the present. And then one day there came a letter to his father, in which Tom said that he had yielded at last to his old craving to be a soldier. He had enlisted in the 40th Regiment.
"As you were a soldier yourself, father," wrote Tom, "you will understand how I have always loved the army. I can never forget that I was born on the march. Tell mother not to grieve for me, because I am very happy here now, and I like the life so much that I have no desire to leave it."