Their uncle’s childless wife loathes them. She has Cassandra kidnapped to force the other sisters to sail with a group of starving cotton lasses to Australia. When Cassandra escapes, she follows them. Reece is in Australia too. Surely now she’ll find happiness? But the voyage brings its own difficulties and the past still casts a long shadow.

ANNA'S NOTES
I kept the information about 60 cotton lasses being sent to Western Australia in 1863 for ten years, feeling that one day I might write a story based on that.

The time came in 2006, when I bought 'An Australian Parsonage' by Mrs Edward Millett, a facsimile edition of a book of memoirs first published in 1872. To my delight the first chapter was an account of the voyage out on the 'Tartar'. This is the ship on which the real cotton lasses sailed to Western Australia (also known then as the Swan River Colony), arriving in December 1863. I knew then that the time had come to write my story.

And what a pleasure that was! I always love story-telling, but I also thoroughly enjoy learning more about my adopted country from doing the research. I hope I've shared with the readers my own fascination with the history of the 'Cinderella colony' which had only about 30,000 inhabitants in 1863, in an area approximately ten times the size of Britain.

I'd also read about a real millworker who'd called his daughter after Greek goddesses and was learning Greek as he did his weaving in the cotton mill. So when I called the four sisters by Greek names, again I was inspired by real life.