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In 1966 there was issued by the Melbourne University Press one of the most distinctive and finest - as well as perhaps the most unlikely in its authorship - of the Australian regional histories to be produced in the middle third of the twentieth century. Its creator was an American woman of a well-to-do New York family, Louise Tiffany Daley (1895-1978), who had come to Australia in 1946 and settled in Alstonville. Both the style and the circumstances of her life to that point were unlikely for an 'Australian (regional) historian', to say the least, and they contributed to making this book and her pattern of intuitions and of passionate interests, as well as the style of writing, very much ones that were, and still are, 'sui generis'. Her actual text - and it is a record of much insight, fascination and power - was the resultant of several catalysing compulsions, which are discussed in the accompanying biography of the author in this edition. |
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