Seven little Australians - Ethel Turner

Set in Sydney in the 1890s, this is a delightful taste of an Australian childhood as experienced by the seven unruly Woolcot children. Meg, Pip, Judy, Bunty, Nell, Poor Baby and the General are as far from model children as you can get. Living with their strict, military father and his second young wife, the Woolcot children find it endlessly difficult to behave themselves - at least in the way their father would wish. They ceaselessly hatch plans and end up in terrible scrapes, always incurring the wrath of their father and the despair of their stepmother. Though this is, for the most part, a light-hearted, though hugely absorbiing profile of a large eccentric family, it's a tragic ending which is guaranteed to bring tears to the eyes. When Judy, the wildest and most uncontrollable, but dearly loved sibling is is killed by a falling tree while recovering from a bout of TB. This is a classic novel, televised in the 1970s by the BBC.