She is brought up in town by Mrs Irvine and later re-unites with Boshy as she nurses him through his final illness.
Edward Garnett, writing for the Bookman and then reprinted in The Daily Telegraph noted: "The terrible earthiness of human instinct, the underlying egoism of our desires, the determining force of a mean environment, the gauntness and squalidness of decivilised Australian life, are portrayed remorselessly in the figures of half a dozen characters...There is nothing in recent English fiction that is so psychologically remarkable as this book.
"[2] In the Melbourne Herald a reviewer was taken by the sense of realism in the work: "...the truthfulness of the writer is undeniable, and there be many in Australia who can bear witness to it.
After all, too, the squalor and misery which, in these places, would seem to be regarded as mere matters of daily life, is more than equalled in some parts of Merrle England, and the 'toll' of human misery exacted for an existence is often greater than is described even in this terribly realistic work.
It is almost horrible in some of its realism, but it is none the less attractive..."[3] After its original publication in 1907 in England by publishers Duckworth Books[4] the novel was not re-published until: