Ethel Turner (1870-1958), writer, came to Australia with her twice-widowed mother at the age of nine. She attended the selective school Sydney Girls' High before founding a magazine, the Parthenon, contributing the children's page and serialized adult romances for its three-year duration. By 1893 she was editing the children's page of the Illustrated Sydney News; she performed the same function at the Australian Town and Country Journal until 1919. Her first book, Seven Little Australians, was published in London in 1894. The first edition sold out within weeks. Its sequel, The Family at Misrule, appeared in 1895. The following year Turner married the barrister Herbert Raine Curlewis; their son, Adrian, was to become a judge and the first President of the Surf Lifesaving Association of Australia. During World War I, in which Turner worked for patriotic causes, she published a trilogy in which, according to her biographer Brenda Niall, the 'ideal of loyalty to Empire is combined with a strong sense of Australian nationalism'. Once the family moved into their new house, 'Avenel', overlooking Middle Harbour in Mosman, she devoted much time to her garden; in 1925 she published The ungardeners. In all she wrote 34 volumes of fiction and a good deal of other material. Seven Little Australians, in print for more than 100 years, has been translated into at least 13 languages, performed as a stage play, and been made into a film, a BBC television series (1953), a ten-episode television series for the ABC (1973), and a musical (1988).
