Tasmanian Dreaming

Synopsis

Tasmanian Dreaming follows Erin Montgomery, an Oxford literature student who has never quite felt at home in England. In a coffee shop on the High Street in February 2008, she watches Kevin Rudd deliver Australia’s national apology to the Stolen Generations, and something stirs — an old family story about land lost, or perhaps taken, in a place she has never seen. Erin takes a year from her studies and travels to Tasmania to find out what actually happened. What she uncovers in the archives of a colony is a stolen inheritance and a family breach that has never been repaired, and the slow, difficult work of setting it right becomes her own homecoming. Set against Australia’s reckoning with its history and threaded with the poetry of Christopher Brennan, the novel moves between Oxford common rooms, Tasmanian farmland, and nineteenth-century deed records. It is a story about desire and restraint, about beauty held lightly, and about the difference between the house you grew up in and the place you belong. First published as A Clear Dusk Settles (Ark House Press, 2018), it is revised and republished here under a new title.

Key Themes

• •Identity, belonging, and the search for a true home
• •Reconciliation — national and personal
• •The Stolen Generations and Australia’s national apology
• •Inheritance, restitution, and putting right what was broken
• •Love, beauty, and self-knowledge
• •Tasmania as both destination and metaphor
• •Christopher Brennan’s poetry as a thread through the story

Selected Quotes

About the Author

Dr. Graham Leo is a writer, speaker, and educator based on the Gold Coast, Australia. He holds a Doctor of Ministry from the Adelaide College of Divinity and trained at the Oxford Centre for Christian Apologetics under Alister McGrath. For 25 years he served as Principal of two independent Christian schools in Queensland, including Emmanuel College — a multi-denominational K-12 school of over 1,700 students. He is the author of ten books spanning theology, fiction, poetry, education, and pastoral care. Graham describes himself as an “organic theologian” — someone homegrown in faith communities who studies Scripture carefully and communicates its truth to others. He is a Fellow of ISCAST, a graduate of the Australian Institute of Company Directors, and an international conference speaker with engagements across the USA, UK, South Korea, Japan, and the Philippines.