Midnight Sun to Southern Cross: Those who go and those who stay

In the tradition of great family migration stories, Midnight Sun to Southern Cross continues the saga of the Back brothers' flight from Russian occupied Finland to Australia as the nineteenth century turned into the
twentieth.
From frozen Finland to the lush rainforests of northern New South Wales, to the dry and dusty sheep country of western Queensland, you follow the highs and lows of their new life under the Southern Cross.
It is an extraordinary tale of success, failure, hard work and dreaming. What drove the wheeler-dealer Wilhelm Anders Back, known as WA, to become in his time Australia's richest Finn? And what stirred his eccentric
writerly elder brother Karl Johan, KJ, pacifist and political dissenter? What of those who stayed behind in Finland, and bravely struggled to oust the Russians from their homeland? This book, and its predecessor, Burn My
Letters, are timely in the centenary year of Finnish Independence. WA's granddaughter Ruth contrasts his and KJ's formative years in Finland with her own upbringing in outback Queensland. Her voyage of discovery and self-discovery uncovers research in Finland and Australia, and interweaves her own transformation from shy bush girl to speaker and musician.

Author: Ruth Bonetti
Publisher: Words and Musica Bonetti
Published: 05/01/2017
Pages: 262
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 0.86lbs
Size: 9.00h x 6.00w x 0.59d
ISBN: 9780987544247

About the Author
Bonetti, Ruth: - Ruth Bonetti grew up in the arid Queensland outback, intrigued by the strange-accented relatives she met on holidays near Byron Bay. She preferred Mozart to hillbilly music, books to horses. Ruth's gift for classical music became a passport to the world. Destiny led her to live in Sweden, directly across the Gulf of Bothnia from her grandfather's birthplace in Finland, where she researched this story. Ruth is author/editor of a dozen publications about music, education and performance, five through Words and Music and two with Oxford University Press.

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