Above the Starry Frame(2007)

Francis GreensladeHelen Townsend

In 1850, William Irwin arrived in Australia, alone and just eighteen years old. A refugee from Ireland's Potato Famine, hed left a country oppressed with hunger and poverty for the frontiers of a new world. As a digger and a publican in gold rush Ballarat, he was swept up in the Eureka Stockade. With an ocean between William and his loving parents and siblings, he never returned home, though his family continued to write. His great granddaughter Helen Townsend recovered fifty-four of those letters spanning 40 years, and from them she drew powerful inspiration for this book. Above the Starry Frame reimagines the life of William Irwin through the prism of those letters and extensive archival research.