home before setting off on their next adventure. It is her tales of Gippsland which enthuses their adventure in the first place. Farm owners and other itinerant workers fill out the rest of novel's "cast". Steve's character, in particular, is developed through her reactions to and interactions with these supporting characters. Women dressing as men Eve Langley was not the only Australian writer to create a female character who dresses as a man. It was also done by Joseph Furphy in his Such is Life (1903), Jessie Couvreur, who wrote as Tasma in her short story Monsieur Caloche (1889), Marie Bjelke Petersen in Jewelled Nights (1923) and, after Langley, Kylie Tennant in her The Honey Flow (1956). Themes and subject matter The main theme of the book relates to Steve's being "caught between her emotional need for love (and expressing her sexuality), and her intellectual craving for freedom, independence and the life of art as expressed in music and poetry", a freedom, she feels she can best achieve by taking on the name and dress of a man. There is no real resolution to this dilemma at the end of the novel: Blue returns home to marry, while Steve remains in Gippsland, alone. Several critics comment on the sense of nationalism found in the novel. Suzanne Falkiner says that "writing with a mixture of passionate exuberance and wry self-deprecation, Langley combines realistic detail with an almost Lawrentian prose style, in which the emerging sensuality of the girls is projected onto the landscape and into an almost excessive nationalism". She goes on to say that the novel represents a rare, "vivid" example in Australian literature of "the itinerant labouring life: the bands of Italian and Indian itinerants, the work camps, the attempts to ward off starvation by 'bandicooting' pumpkins and oranges from neighbouring farms". Joan Maxwell writes in her Teachers Guide that "Many events reflect Steve and Blue's optimism and sense of fun, but there is often a heavy mood of depression and a fear of the destructiveness of the time, which seems to suggest that a feeling of entrapment might have seeped through from 1940". Style The narrative structure is chronological, and comprises four parts, each part representing a new "job" for the sisters. In between each of these jobs, the sisters return home to their mother. Critical opinion of the style of the novel varies, largely due to the