Jean Martino

Scattered Seeds Jean Martino

"Scattered Seeds" is the fictional story of two English families; Devin and Will Brentwood, who live with and work for Jonas and Elizabeth Wentworth, and their two small sons, Timothy and Edward. In 1836, they are among the first seventy-five settlers to arrive in the newly established model colony of South Australia. The Colonial authorities in London, England, still chafing from the blunderous errors that had cost them the American colonies, chose the southern shores of Australia as the site for a model colony; a colony where only free men would be allowed to settle. The colony of South Australia, although bordering the disreputable convict settlements of New South Wales and Victoria, would have no convicts transported to its shores. The concept was remarkably simple; the colony was to be financed by funds received from advance land sales; the immigrants screened to determine their moral rectitude and industrial zeal. But the one element that the colonial fathers overlooked in creating their "garden of Eden" colony, was the confounding fallibity of human nature. Governors, appointed by the London colonial office, are dispatched and recalled with frightening rapidity; each one bringing his own untried techniques to send the colony plunging into bankruptcy one minute, then climbing to economic booms the next. The hoped-to-be model colonists traveled halfway around the world to be confronted by more turmoil and strife than they had left England to escape from. The story is fictional, but has been interwoven with historical figures and events, and follows the triumphs and despair of the early colonists. But first...there were the native Aboriginals...