Australian children’s classics: Seven Little Australians is our own Little Women – but naughty, not earnest

There is an image from Ethel Turner’s 1894 Australian children’s classic novel, Seven Little Australians , that has stayed with me for more than 50 years.

Judy Woolcot, third of the seven children, in a stained and torn pink overdress and a battered straw hat, slicing the air and bits of her dress with a grass scythe that is almost as long as she is tall.

Judy, 13, is cutting the grass in an effort to please her father, who watches with growing trepidation from the side verandah of the family home.

Appeasing Father is a regular activity for Judy and her siblings.

In this instance, it comes after Judy has led the children in an invasion of an adult dinner party, seeking roast fowl instead of their unsatisfactory tea of bread and butter.

Judy has unconventional ideas about fathers and parenting for an 19th-century girl – and a habit of embarrassing her father, the stern “military man” Captain Woolcot.

She is generally always sorry for it, with varying degrees of sincerity and self-interest.

The seven children range in age from the eldest, 16-year-old Meg, to The General, baby of the other children’s impossibly young stepmother, Esther. (“Seven of you, and I’m only twenty!” she says at one point.) Seven Little Australians, a bestseller on publication, would sell over 2 million copies, be translated into at least 11 languages, and be adapted for the stage, film and television.

It has never been out of print.

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Like many Australians of my generation, I was introduced to the book when the ABC broadcast its television adaptation in 1973, with a faithful script by Eleanor Witcombe .

My mother found me a copy of the book, beginning my lifelong devotion to Judy and the rest of the Woolcots.

My website and social media profiles are all variations of “Misrule”, the nickname given to the chaotic home of the Woolcot children and their long-suffering parents.