Ethel Turner was a child under ten when she moved from England to Sydney, Australia, in 1880. She was to capture her experience of emigration and settler childhood in several of her children's stories. Famous – and now almost exclusively remembered for – her creation of the Woolcot children at Misrule in Seven Little Australians (1894) and its sequels, Turner wrote numerous novels and short stories as well as non-fiction pieces. With her elder sister Lilian she ran a school magazine and, in 1889, established the sixpenny monthly the Parthenon. She contributed to Sydney's anti-British Bulletin and edited the ‘Children's Page’ of the Illustrated Sydney News, of the Australian Town and Country Journal, and in the 1920s, of the Sunday Sun. The Misrule books are generally acknowledged to have a strong sense of place and to be characterized by a conscious effort to describe and define the freer girlhood that was possible in the settler colony. Failed settler homes seem out of place in the works of an avowedly nationalist Australian writer. Yet Turner repeatedly sets in the foreground more than one movement across the globe. Migration rarely is one-way or final; nor does Turner ever gloss over disappointments or failures. But as Turner's characters deal with repeated leave-taking and new homes, their struggles to adapt cast a different light on transoceanic migration and what it meant for families in colonial Australia.

This chapter explores multiple migrations in a cluster of Turner's turn-of-the-century novels.