Beneath The Southern Cross

Judy has painstakingly researched the history of Sydney and given us the incredible story of a city and the people who shaped it. In 1783, nineteen-year-old Thomas Kendall is sentenced to transportation for attempted theft. Several years later he finds himself bound for Australia and God knows what fate.Through hard work, a keenly learnt sense of justice and the help of his loving wife Mary, Thomas first earns his freedom and then sets about creating the transport and property empire which will make him a very wealthy man. He's a little eccentric by the standards of the day. He even befriends a local Aboriginal elder, Wolawara, learns his language and, much to the horror of the hoi polloi, bequeaths a parcel of land in Parramatta to him and his kin. But his idyll would not last. The next generation, brought up with the comforts and privileges of wealth would forge a irreparable rift that would echo down through the family for some 170 years. So begins this story which is as much that of the city of Sydney as it is a family chronicle. With her uncanny ability to bring history to life in technicolour, Judy Nunn traces the fortunes of Thomas Kendall's descendents through the booms