Yet there is a gulf between the vain young Belle and her intelligent, spiky cousin, who writes letters to Voss (he has promised, also, to write to her, but the mutiny of the team’s scout scuppers that plan). The expedition meets with drought and storm, menace and despair, abandonment by one of the scouts, and finally mutiny.īack in Sydney Town, Laura and her cousin Belle deal with family dramas of their own. Voss sees more than there is in the map, sometimes he sees in spite of the map. It is a voyage not just inland but, as David Marr puts it, “to the outer limits of the imagination”. Among them are the ex-convict Mr Judd, the determined Frank Le Mesurier, and a skinny ornithologist named Palfreyman, as well as a drunk, a boy, and two Aboriginal scouts. At last Voss sets out with his team northward toward the interior of the country, with the aim of reaching near what is now Darwin. Before setting out with his team, Voss gets to know his financier, Edward Bonner, and Bonner’s keen-eyed niece Laura Trevelyan. Plot: In Sydney Town, 1854, Johann Ulrich Voss, a German immigrant, recruits a team for an expedition into the interior of the great Australian continent, still largely unexplored by white people. “But the old man could only laugh, because time did not exist.” Tom Roberts, In a corner on the Macintyre (1895)
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