About the Book

“Thursday’s Child,” aka Peter Tobin – foundling, drover, shearer, horse-breaker, soldier, and pastoralist – travelled far and wide throughout the Australian outback in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century.The legacy of his widely scattered seed is gathered up in this tale of fatal misunderstandings, murder, and altruism, spanning the years 1910 to 1974. Like the Peter Tobin memoir

“Thursday’s Child” that precedes it, the author gives a respectful nod to history pedants and reminds them this is a work of fiction. Thursday’s Child is the first novel by Clive Thomas. A retired grazier (rancher), he lives in a seacoast village just north of Sydney, Australia. He spent his childhood years amongst the last

of the Australian Bushmen. Apart from following the boyhood and pre-World War II career of the fictional Harry Perrottet (1910 to 1946), his second novel Sevengate spans the years 1947 to 1974. The setting shifts from Sydney, Australia, to the temperate inland town of Kangamite to a sheep station (ranch) called Sevengate, which is also featured in Thursday’s Child. Says the author, “I found I’d conjured up many characters from my past who belonged to an extinct species. They weren’t going to rest until I’d told their tales.”