Overview

Fran McMillan, a thirty-something chisel-wielding woman, is camped at Mount Clear in Namadgi National Park, escaping the heat of a Queensland summer, when she encounters Kelvin, one of a group of men from Canberra restoring a high-country hut. She inveigles her way into the work party - a weekend that changes her life. As Fran works on the hut, she hears the fragmented story of the pioneering Thompson family who came to live in the harsh Snow Belt in 1909, and of Yenohan, an Aboriginal girl who befriended their daughter, Eleanor. Love also pays Fran a brief visit during the weekend when she follows Kelvin into the wilderness. Fran returns to Queensland and resumes furniture making until a disaster calls her back south: it is January 2003, and wildfires are racing through the Alps, ravaging the national park, destroying lovingly-restored huts in their path and altering the nature of the Australian High Country forever. In Queensland, Fran watches television reports in disbelief as a firestorm engulfs the outer suburbs of Canberra, consuming 500 homes and four people. For three days, she tries to contact Kelvin. On the fourth she throws her backpack into her car and drives south to Canberra to face the truth - and Kelvin's wife and family. Whilst in Canberra Fran visits Tilly Anderson (a descendant of the Thompson family) and the final pieces of the puzzle surrounding the relationship between the family and Yenohan fall into place.

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9780648578611

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Reviews

I loved the way you followed the modern girl's story and the pioneer women's as well, flowing smoothly between time periods. It was great that you wrote it as a novel and not as dry information on Australian history. All in all, you are a great writer. - Michelle Freeman; Read the book and thoroughly enjoyed it - could relate to it and found historical part very interesting. I can appreciate the amount of research that has gone into it. Makes me want to go to Mt. Clear again to do a few walks again. - Chas Reid KHA; I've finally had a chance to read Yenohan's Legacy, and I've just finished it. Wow! What a wonderful story, and told so compellingly! You have a way of bringing tears to readers' eyes. Josephine Brown (Society of Editors.

Author Information

Dale Lorna Jacobsen is a freelance writer who has the good fortune to live in the bush just outside Maleny in the Hinterland of the Sunshine Coast. She is passionate about grass-roots history, which led to the publication of three novels: Union Jack (2011), political intrigue set in Queensland in the 1920s; Yenohan's Legacy (2013), a story of love and life in the High Country of Australia, Being Lucy (2018), the story of a mountain recluse set in East Gippsland. In 2019 she co-authored Antarctic Engineer: Memoir of John Russell with 99-year-old John. In 2013 she fulfilled a life-long dream, taking part in an expedition to Antarctica, and produced an eBook, Why Antarctica? a Ross Sea odyssey (2015). Dale has since returned twice to Antarctic.

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