Shadows of Time

by Patricia Wrightson

United in their desperate longing to find a true home, two orphans, an Australian Aboriginal boy and a scullery maid from Parramatta encounter each other in 1798 and continue their search through space and time together.

Genres: Fantasy

175 pages, Paperback

Published October 1, 1995

About the author

Winner of the Dromkeen Medal (1984).
Patricia Wrightson is one of Australia's most distinguished writers for children. Her books have won many prestigious awards all over the world. She was awarded an OBE (Officer of the British Empire) in 1977, the Dromkeen Medal in 1984 and the Hans Christian Andersen Medal in 1986, all for her services to children's literature. She is a four-time winner of the Australian Children's Book Council Book of the Year Award: in 1956 for The Crooked Snake, in 1974 for The Nargun and the Stars, in 1978 for The Ice Is Coming and in 1984 for A Little Fear. Patricia lives and writes in a beautiful stretch of the Australian bush beside the Clarence River in northern New South Wales.

Reviews

[Anne Turner · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is my favourite of Patricia Wrightson's books, which is saying a lot, because I love all her works. A writer of great talent and imagination. For slightly older or mature child readers, but enjoyable for anyone who appreciates well written Australian-set stories.

[Imean Hussain]

Shadows of time summary of the novelby Mehr nigar

[SBC · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was a very good read. It was about two children who run away from social injustice and in that running are gifted with special powers, the boy over fire, the girl over water. When they find each other, they stop growing and start shifting through time at a rate of about 20 years to 2-5 of their own, perhaps. They are accompanied by a Magooya, a mythical Aboriginal figure made up by Wrightson who is able to shape change, one of the Aboriginal demons, who protects them both though he much prefers the boy. He often takes the form of a fire lizard.

The story is very well written and the style is readable with beautiful descriptions (especially the descriptions of water). The boy, whose name is never told to us, and Sarah Jane, or S'Jane as he calls her are delightful characters and though they live a long time they never seem to mature past being about 10 years old. The descriptions of the landscape are particularly interesting and the description of the impact of the historical process of change upon it, as they journey across the country to visit the great Grandfather spirit (locked in a rock/shell) then back to bury his grandfather. Eventually, the great grandfather spirit who sings of time/eternity is put in a shop, an incongruous, ironic image, and they rescue him and are taken to live with the hairy-men.

I expected that eventually they would go back to our society to live, as she took us right up to modern times, but then no, to the hairy men who live just outside Sydney still and treated them as family. Interesting, because by the end I realised to come back to our time wouldn't be right for them; they were too powerful, too elemental to be trapped in rigorous time now. So to the hairy men gave the same sense of getting a chance to grow up and live in society without being trapped by social inventions of reality and other conventions. But not necessarily, might have stayed kids for ever, who knows. By the end that wasn't what was important, but that they lived.