Showing results for "mary anne o'connor" in 20th Century

At 17, Veronica O'Shay is happier running wild on the family farm than behaving in the ladylike manner her mother requires, and she despairs both of her secret passion for her brother's friend Jack Murphy and what promises to be a future of restraint and compliance. But this is 1913 and the genteel tranquillity of rural Beecroft is about to change forever as the O'Shay and Murphy families, along with their friends the Dwyers, are caught up in the theatre of war and their fates become intertwined.

1930. Seventeen-year-old Iris Mitchell dreams of designing clothes, but there's little spare cash for fashion in their shanty-town home. By day, Iris scrubs the floors at Caron's, an upmarket department store. By night, she designs and sews in her family's tiny, crowded house. When John reappears, passions are reignited, and Iris must face not only their religious divide, but the apparent impossibility of having a career once married.

Eighteen-year-old Junie Wallace is a smart girl and, with two brothers away at war and a third recently killed in action, she knows there is only one way to save the family farm for her grieving parents. Unfortunately, that solution involves marrying the unscrupulous Ernest, and breaking the heart of the young drover she loves, Michael. But the war is looming ever closer, and when Pearl Harbour brings the threat of Japanese aggression to Australian shores, the fates of many becomes inextricably interwoven.

The 1960s are beating a fresh pulse of political and cultural upheaval through Sydney. For sheltered convent schoolgirl Poppy Flannery such changes seem irrelevant. But it doesn't stop her from longing to join in, especially if it means spending time with the popular boy she secretly loves, Ben Williamson. So when a dream escape to Surfers Paradise arrives, Poppy and her twin sister Rosemary seize it and find themselves in the midst of the swinging 60s at last.