Ends of The Earth by Mary Gaunt — Read

I do not know how other people write short stories, but for myself I seldom do it unless I come across an incident that interests me deeply or some scene that cries out to be illustrated. I know I never write a successful short story unless one of these conditions is fulfilled, so it comes that in collecting together this book I seem to be going step by step once again through my own life.

I was a baby of six when the wanderings of my parents took me to Gippsland in the south of Victoria, and the vivid green of the dense tea-tree scrub impressed itself on my mind. There I first remember seeing the Australian aboriginal, and there I first heard, without comprehending the grim tragedy that lay behind, the story of the brig that was wrecked on Ninety Mile Beach, and the white woman who lived with the blacks and despairingly traced initials on the forest trees. My father was a commissioner, then called a warden, of the goldfields, and he used to tell us tales of the early days and the strange people he had come across, and how in the wild rush for gold it often happened that the criminal ended a gentleman and the gentleman a criminal, and we children in our turn speculated what our father would have done had an old friend come to him with a price upon his head. So when I grew older I wrote "A Dilemma."