An insightful and moving story of life in nineteenth and early twentieth century Australia, from one of the country’s most celebrated biographers.

Brenda Niall has turned her biographer’s eye to a personal subject – her grandmother, Aggie. She tells the story of a fiercely independent and intelligent woman who braved a new country as a single woman, teaching in a country school, before marrying a Riverina grazier, whose large powerful family was wary of the newcomer with ideas of her own.

Aggie dealt with hardships and loneliness after the early and drawn-out death of her husband, and brought up her seven children to be happy – all with a calm determination. But it was the memory box and her longing for the sea that captured the imagination of her granddaughter.

Brenda Niall is one of Australia’s foremost biographers. Her acclaimed biography Mannix won the 2016 Australian Literature Society’s Gold Medal for Literature and the National Biography Award. In 2004 she was awarded the Order of Australia for ‘services to Australian literature, as an academic, biographer and literary critic’.