June 1893

June 1893 anchors a decisive stretch of the novel in which Everton presents itself as a new town even as its institutions threaten the Johnson family. The date appears beneath the town’s freshly erected sign; around it, an economic depression and settler development form the backdrop to a struggle over who has authority to define, protect, and keep children.

A New Town in a Time of Hardship

In June 1893, Sergeant Nathanael Clintoff walks Everton’s main street past new construction on the outer streets. He is excited by the growth and regards the settlement as his town. Its new wooden sign bears the name Everton and the date June 1893, making the month a concrete marker of the town’s development. The scene’s confidence in expansion sits uneasily beside the costs of the frontier order on which that development depends.

Economic pressure reaches beyond the town’s public face. The sheep industry has nearly collapsed, and the depression has tightened household circumstances. Molly Johnson describes the established droving cycle: fifteen thousand sheep have come from Queensland, and her husband, Joe, and his companions take them to the high country for three months before bringing them down ahead of the first snowfall for sale. The work provides money and leaves Molly with time alone with her children, but the shrinking industry makes the family’s reliance on that pattern precarious.

The same period also frames political debate about recovery. At a formal gathering, Rosa discusses Senator Turner’s policy of strict economy, balanced budgets, tax increases, and spending cuts, which is restoring confidence among Victorians even as the effects of the depression remain uncertain. Molly’s interest in women’s rights and Aboriginal affairs meets a revealing limit when she learns that the Australian Natives Association excludes Aboriginal people: in its usage, natives means Australian-born white men.

Racial Classification and the Removal Order

The threat to the Johnson children becomes explicit when Miss Shirley tells Judge Eisenmangher that Molly is sheltering a wanted Aboriginal man and calls the children octaroons. She presents the classification as a reason they need urgent help. The judge signs a letter authorizing their removal, stating that it is for their safety. The language of protection therefore serves as the administrative justification for separating children from their mother.

The order’s meaning reaches Molly through Danny. When he returns and tells her that Miss Shirley called the children octaroons, Molly recognizes the term from her own childhood. At eight, she had overheard Miss Shirley discussing the possibility of sending her away because of her mixed ancestry. The recollection makes the present danger legible: Molly understands that the label can be used to take her children, and the story Yadaka told her about her heritage now connects her past to the threat before her.

Molly responds by taking the children and the signed paper from the people who have authorized the separation. She binds Miss Shirley and Father McGuinness, confronts Miss Shirley with the document, and burns it. The words naming the children, declaring removal necessary, and recording the judge’s permission disappear in the fire. Molly then gathers blankets and food for the wagon in which the children are waiting, turning the immediate aftermath of the order into a hurried effort to keep the family together.

Frontier Expansion and the Land

June 1893’s town-building is part of a longer history of settlement and displacement. The novel describes white settlers taking land, fencing it, and driving the Ngarigo and neighboring peoples away from homelands where life had followed seasonal movement. Under the settlers’ stated law, white men claimed the right to shoot Aboriginal people on sight or disperse them in the name of national progress.

Charles Edwards had advocated developing the outpost of Cresthill into a town. He pointed to the stock route and the arrival of farmers and settlers, offered to finance development, and argued that Aboriginal people needed to be managed. District leaders approved the proposal, and the decision was applied quickly to the alpine clans. Set beside Everton’s new sign, this history makes the date more than a record of civic growth: the town’s emergence belongs to a process that restricts Indigenous access to Country and recasts displacement as development.

The Wider Frame of the Date

The novel’s environmental crises deepen the pressure on families already facing political and economic danger. During heavy rains, a flood carries Delphi’s rag doll away and sends a boulder more than six feet high rolling through the swollen river. Molly wakes, sees the danger, and moves Delphi up the bank, then calls the boys off the boulders when she realizes the flood has risen around them. Later, in severe mountain snow, Danny carries Delphi, whose condition is uncertain, while his brothers struggle through the landscape in search of Yadaka’s cave. Weather and terrain shape the children’s chances of survival as directly as the town’s institutions shape their prospects of remaining with their mother.

The date also sits within the novel’s retrospective structure. In the author’s note, Leah Purcell explains that a teenage desire to understand her Aboriginality, family history, and what government policy had prevented her mother and grandparents from passing on led her to historical research and the oral stories of elders. She describes the fictional world of Molly Johnson as drawing on family and Australian history. June 1893 thus marks the story’s historical setting while the novel’s framing connects its family drama to memory, cultural loss, and the transmission of stories across generations.