Weekend Coffee Share – 3rd October, 2021.

Welcome to my first Weekend Coffee Share at my new blog – Tea With Ethel Turner. I will still be doing my regular coffee share over at Beyond the Flow, my regular blog. For those of you not familiar with the Weekend Coffee Share, it might sounds strange for me to be talking about coffee instead of tea. However, no one’s forcing anybody to drink coffee over there. You can drink whatever takes your fancy. I personally prefer tea. Start the day with two cups of Twining’s English Breakfast. Coffee no longer agrees with me, and these days I only have it intermittently and usually at a cafe.

So, how are you? I hope you’ve had a great week.

I started Tea With Ethel Turner on the 21st September, almost two weeks ago. Ethel Turner is considered one of Australia’s greatest and most loved children’s author’s That is, despite being born in England and her books being more suited to young adults, and equally suited to adults and being read to a younger child has often been the case. Ethel Turner had 40 novels published, the most famous being her first – Seven Little Australians, which is the first in a trilogy the Woolcot family. Strong comparisons were made with Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women series, and Ethel Turner has been called Australia’s Louisa May Alcott more than once.

I guess a very valid question is what has attracted a 52 year old woman who was up to her neck obsessively researching and writing up the biographies of Australia’ s WWI soldiers, to become so obsessed with Ethel Turner? It actually had very little to do with Seven Little Australians, and was more about the columns she wrote as “Chief Sunbeamer”. These were also directed at children, but openly discussed her desire to make the world a better place, and after the horrors of WWI, hope lay in the younger generation. I am also interested in how she grapples with the big issues of life, and a recurring theme is death, faith and the power of prayer. She was as much a philosopher as she was a writer.

I don’t know how many of you write fiction, and have created worlds for your characters as well as the characters themselves. I don’t know whether any of you have thought that you’re playing God bringing all these elements together, and deciding how it all plays out. Moreover, a bit like God found himself, your creations can take on a mind of their own, and do their own thing. Of course, as an author, you can always kill them off when they get too big for their boots. Ethel Turner has done that too. Indeed, she’s famous for it.

Anyway, I thought I’d list the posts to date because they really should be read in order although not every post will interest you, and some are geared more towards an Australian academic level. However, if you are struggling to understand any of the Australianisms, please feel free to ask for clarification. Hopefully, I have this covered love for the vernacular.

So here are the posts so far:

Welcome to Tea With Ethel Turner: https://wordpress.com/post/teawithethelturner.com/31

Ethel Turner’s Worldview:

https://wordpress.com/post/teawithethelturner.com/56

Ethel Turner’s Rainbow Poem: https://wordpress.com/post/teawithethelturner.com/77

The Beginnings of Ethel Turner: https://wordpress.com/post/teawithethelturner.com/104

The Mysterious Lucy Turner (Ethel’s Step-Sister): https://wordpress.com/post/teawithethelturner.com/139

Another Author in the Turner Family- Madeleine Board Honey

https://wordpress.com/post/teawithethelturner.com/159

A Short Story By Madeleine Board – “An Artist’s View”

https://wordpress.com/post/teawithethelturner.com/184

Another Short Story By Madeleine Board: “Two Birds With One Stone”.

https://wordpress.com/post/teawithethelturner.com/191

I must admit I’m rather chuffed about my efforts so far. I knew I’d been accumulating quite a lot of material, and I also wanted to connect with other fans of Ethel Turner, literature and aspiring authors who are keen to learn. Goodness knows where it’s all heading, but as much as this progress is reassuring, I’m concerned I’m creating a monster. How much work is this going to take? She wrote 40 novels and edited the children’s pages in multiple publications. This could go on forever, and as you may be aware this is my secondary research project. It’s not the main game, but there is some overlap.

Well, on that note, I’m heading off to make another cup of tea. This one’s turned cold.

Meanwhile, you might like to join us over at the Weekend Coffee Share, which is hosted by Natalie the Explorer https://natalietheexplorer.home.blog/

Best wishes,

Rowena

PS If you’re interested in writing short stories, I recommend you read the two stories I posted by Ethel Turner’s step-niece, Madeleine Board.