Set in Adelaide in the early 1850s Clara Morison tells the story of a young educated woman who migrates to South Australia from Scotland kwowing very little of her new home. Clara finds work battles illness discovers relatives and slowly finds her place in the struggling colony. Her story which reveals the fine details of colonial domestic life is set against the turbulence of the gold fever when men and money streamed out of South Australia to the goldfields in the eastern colonies. The problems of a new and vulnerable colonist and the atmosphere of public and private financial upheaval are successfully recreated by Spence making Clara Morison by far the finest novel of colonial South Australia.
