Progress with quilting what I am now working on has been slow – first blogged on 13/8/06 and inturrupted by various things like travel, surgery, christmas visitors and so on. With DH away for a few days I am again working on it, but it’s quite large, and closely hand quilted, and I keep asking myself why I do this stuff. I have been making good progress since listenging to a recorded version of Pride and Prejudice. I know the story and writing so well that I don’t mind hearing the same disc over several times – which happens because there seem to be all kinds of interruptions. The plastic thimble thingy I normally have on the underside of the quilting as I go is not being much help – since the work is not mounted on any kind of frame, the thimble keeps coming off in the manoeuvrings of the quilt on the shiny table I’m doing it on. So the basic callous had to be worked up and now I have it I need to keep going.

I have just finished reading a marvellous Kate Grenville novel, “The Secret River”. Being out of Aus much of the time I have somehow managed to not read her last two novels before this one, but they are top of my shopping list next time I go. There have been other good novels about the early days of colonial Aus written about real or imaginary characters who came out as convicts – e.g. “Morgan’s Run” by Colleen McCullough, and Bryce Courtney’s “The Potato Factory” come to mind instantly, and there are others of course. The story of convict Will Thornhill and his wife is fictional, but woven into what must have been experiences shared by many of his time. Many Australians today have little understanding of the feelings of those involved in this clash of cultures and its tragic results.