Lizzie's Tale
About this ebook
This is a story of a girl from inner Sydney. Her family is poor, her father dies when she is nine, life is hard. But her courage rises above adversity. It is story of her struggle to survive and make a life of her own, first as a prostitute, then with her child in a remote outback town.
This is the second book in the series, "Old Balmain House" and begins in the same house as the first book and continues part of the story of Sophie, the girl who vanished half a century ago. Lizzie, aged eight, meets Sophie, the girl who lived in the same bedroom as a child. Sophie becomes her friend.
When Lizzie turns fifteen Sophie tries to warn her not to go in a car with three older boys.
Lizzie ignores her warning and is brutally raped by these three men.
Lizzie becomes pregnant and is determined to keep her child. She leaves Sydney and goes to Melbourne, to have and keep her baby. Here, penniless and desperate, she become a prostitute the only way she can support herself. She is discovered and the authorities try to take her child.
She flees to Broome, a small town in the furthest corner of of Australia. Here she assumes the role of widow with a small child and settles into this friendly town. Her life is good until a man from her former life finds her and threatens to expose her or harm her child.
She runs again. On a remote desert road her car breaks down. Without water, with her six year old daughter beside her, they face death from thirst. Help comes in an unexpected way. She takes refuge in a local aboriginal community.
Her school friend from Balmain, now a journalist, seeks retribution from the the men who raped Lizzie many years ago and have continued their ways with others. Now, as successful business men, they seek to use the law to deny justice.
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About the author
Graham Wilson lives in Sydney Australia. He has completed and published nine books. They comprise two series, The Old Balmain House Series and the Crocodile Spirit Dreaming Series along with a family memoir. Children of Arnhem's Kaleidoscope.
The first series starts with a novel called "The Old Balmain House" based on an old a weatherboard cottage in Sydney where the author lived. Here a photo was discovered of a small girl who lived and died about 100 years ago. The book imagines the story of her life and family, based in the real Balmain, an early inner Sydney suburb, with it's locations and and historical events providing part of the story background. The second novel in this series, Lizzie's Tale" builds on "The Old Balmain House" setting, It is the story of a working class teenage girl who lives in this same house in the 1950s and 1960s, It tells of how, when she becomes pregnant she is determined not to surrender her baby for adoption, and of her struggle to survive in this unforgiving society. The third novel in this series, Devil's Choice, follows the next generation of the family in Lizzie's Tale. Lizzie's daughter is faced with the awful choice of whether to seek the help of one of her mother's rapists' in trying to save the life of her own daughter who is inflicted with an incurable disease.
The Crocodile Spirit Dreaming Series comprises five novels based in Outback Australia. The first novel "Just Visiting." tells the story of an English backpacker, Susan, who visits the Northern Territory and becomes captivated and in great danger from a man who loves crocodiles. The second book in the series, "The Diary" follows the consequences of the first book based around the discovery of this man's remains and his diary and Susan, being placed on trial for murder. The third book, "The Empty Place" is about Susan's struggle to retain her sanity in jail while her family and friends desperately try to find out what really happened on that fateful day before it is too late. In "The Lost Girls" Susan vanishes and it tells the story of the search for her and four other lost girls whose passports were found in the possession of the man she killed. The final book in the series, "Sunlit Shadow Dance" tells of how a girl turns up in a remote community in the north of Australia with no memory. She looks like the missing backpacker Susan but knows nothing of her past. It is a story of how she seeks to rebuild her life from an empty shell but with the past seeking to pull her back and damage her from places within its hidden shadows.
The book, "Children of Arnhem's Kaleidoscope" is the story of the author's own life in the Northern Territory. It tells of his childhood in an aboriginal community in remote Arnhem Land, in Australia's Northern Territory, one of its last frontiers. It tells of the people, danger and beauty of this place, and of its transformation over the last half century with the coming of aboriginal rights and the discovery or uranium. It also tells of his surviving an attack by a large crocodile and of his work over two decades in the outback of the NT.
Graham is in the early stages of planning a memoir about his family's connections with Ireland called "Memories Only Remain" and also is compiling information for a book about the early NT cattle industry, its people and its stories,
Graham writes mostly for the creative pleasure it brings him. He is particularly gratified each time an unknown person chooses to download and read something he has written and write a review - good or bad, as this gives him an insight into what readers enjoy and helps him make ongoing improvements to his writing.
In his non writing life he is a veterinarian working with farmers, as well as wild animals and in conservation across Australia
