Book launch: The Art Deco mansion in St Lucia. What drove the man who built it?

Article in The Chronicle, Thursday 15 July, 2021

The Courier Mail Arts Journalist, Phil Brown wrote a story about this iconic landmark heritage house. (Saturday 29 May, 2021)

St Lucia, the Brisbane suburb famed for its university campus, emerged despite world wars, Spanish Influenza and Depression. In the 1950s, kangaroos hopped across open paddocks; snakes slithered through scrub and sugar cane fields. The sanitary cart, ice man, milkman and whistle-tooting postman traversed rutted dirt roads to service the community. And, each morning, sun-warmed milk churned the stomachs of the students at Ironside State School.

Then, as bold new scaffolding reached for the sky, people watched, amazed, and asked Who could build this huge mansion—with an elevator in it—when rationing still exists?

In this St Lucia setting, a wide-eyed child of the outback overcame her terror of big schools, big cities, and big universities as a man of vision, faith and love inspired her to rise above life’s challenges. A man of vision, faith and love inspired her to rise about such challenges.

This is the story of her grandfather. The third book of Ruth Bonetti’s Midnight Sun to Southern Cross trilogy gives his own voice from interviews and voluminous correspondence, to answer the question: What drove this Migrant-Made-Good?