This is a colonial novel by a colonial wi It deals with the diverse life and conditions of two embryo nationalities that are usually grouped under the term Australasia—the island colony of New Zealand and the semi-tropical continental Commonwealth. The story, woven round the career of an artist, opens on a sheep run in the far south of New Zealand, a lonely expanse of treeless hill country, scantily clothed with the tufted silky Known as tussocks, Here the heroine, Aroha, whose Maori name hints of her descent from the first owners of the land, meets the boy, and though between her and him stands his art, in the end the woman wins. There are other heroines in the story, and the reaction of their personalities upon the artist makes stable a character immature and fluid. Throughout the story runs the contrast between New Zealand and Australia, the struggle between Labour and Art, the inevitable antagonism of the sexes.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.