Earth's Quality

This novel, published in 1935, is set in Laverock, a New South Wales farm on which three generations of the Weldon family live. The patriarch, John Weldon, persists in determining how the farm will be run and preserves the agricultural methods of his generation. He negotiates to hand over control of the farm to Alec, son of Charles, the only one of his sons to survive the war. Charles is a poet and is somewhat estranged from his family but his son is more grounded and has studied in agricultural college ahead of coming to his grandfather's farm. The other main characters of the novel are James Fraser and Tinonee, his daughter. Fraser had been an unsuccessful tenant at Laverock when Tinonee was a child. She returns in her early twenties on a nostalgic road trip having begun to assert herself as an enterprising businesswoman and attracts the admiration of both Charles and Alec.

The author, Winifred Birkett (born 28 August 1897), was born into a family of writers, musicians and artists. She began her literary career with the publication of a collection of poetry in 1932. Her first novel was published in the following year. This novel, her second, was well received and was awarded the prestigious Australian Literature Society Gold Medal.

This novel is significant in its depiction of a family that is almost obliterated by the war. In the first chapter, John Weldon complains that “[the] house sounds very empty” and reminds his servant, Anthony, that he had four sons:
“The little privileged Cockney man-of-all-work knew all about those sons. He had been batman in turn to two of them in France, had buried Warren there with his own hands and afterwards spent two years vainly seeking to hear the end of John. Leslie, whom he could not follow to Palestine, had died, they told him, five miles from Jerusalem... The place had sounded inexpressibly empty to him since the day he had come back to it alone.”
The other family central to the novel had also suffered from the impact of the war. James Fraser is described as having been “broken by war”. As a tenant of the Weldons, he was “a dispirited man from the beginning” and, having left there, he drifted from unsuccessful project to unsuccessful project. Charles Weldon remembers him as “a war-wreck” but another of the Weldons recalled that Fraser had been recommended for the Victoria Cross in 1917, suggesting that he was strong and courageous before his breakdown.
The novel, however, is ultimately a romance and expresses confidence in the ability of the next generation to keep the name going. John Weldon is determined to die happy in the knowledge that the war had not been able to destroy all that he had lived for.