Ethel Turner

Ethel Turner (1870–1958), writer, was born in Yorkshire and came to Australia with her twice-widowed mother, Sarah, and sister, Lillian, at the age of nine. While students at Sydney Girls’ High, Ethel and Lillian started their own magazine, Isis, and after finishing school established another journal, named Parthenon, to which Ethel contributed the children’s page and romance stories. She later edited the children’s pages of the Town and Country Journal and the Illustrated Sydney News. She was twenty-four when her first and most famous novel, Seven Little Australians, was published. The novel, which was distinct for its Sydney suburban setting and its representation of typical Australian childhood experiences, was a blistering success, the first edition selling out within weeks and Turner’s publisher immediately contracting her to produce a sequel, The Family at Misrule, which appeared in 1895. Turner married lawyer Herbert Curlewis in Sydney in April 1896; in 1903 they moved with their two children, Jean and Adrian, to Avenel, a house in Mosman that was Turner’s home for the remainder of her life. Turner’s output was considerable; between 1896 and 1928, when her last novel was published, she produced an average of one book each year, as well as writing regularly for newspapers and magazines. Though by the end of her career she had written thirty- four volumes of fiction in addition to poetry, plays, and prose, Ethel Turner’s first novel remains the one she is famous for. Seven Little Australians has been translated into at least thirteen languages, performed as a stage play and made into a film, two television series and a musical. It has never been out of print since it first appeared in 1894.

Harold Cazneaux (1878–1953) came to Australia from his native New Zealand at the age of eleven. The family settled in Adelaide, where Harold began working as a retoucher in a photographic studio while taking classes at the Adelaide School of Art. In 1904, he moved to Sydney; five years later he held his first solo photographic exhibition, which is considered the first major solo exhibition by an Australian photographer. By 1920, Cazneaux had his own studio at his home at Roseville, and was engaged by publisher and artist Sydney Ure Smith as the photographer for magazines including The Home and Art in Australia. Many of Cazneaux’s photographs of Sydney, produced over a number of decades, have become key images of aspects of Australian history. Cazneaux’s portrait of Ethel Turner shows her in the window of her study at Avenel and was featured in an article published in Australian Home Beautiful in 1928.