Australian children’s classics: Seven Little Australians is our own Little Women – but naughty, not earnest

There is an image from Ethel Turner’s 1894 Australian children’s classic novel, Seven Little Australians, that has stayed with me for more than 50 years. Judy Woolcot, third of the seven children, in a stained and torn pink overdress and a battered straw hat, slicing the air and bits of her dress with a grass scythe that is almost as long as she is tall. Judy, 13, is cutting the grass in an effort to please her father, who watches with growing trepidation from the side verandah of the family…