Winner of the David Unaipon Award, an engaging, moving and often funny yarn about growing up in the home of two Aunties running a sheep farm in rural Gundagai. Growing up in the shifting landscape of Gundagai with her Nan and Aunties, Sunny spends her days playing on the hills near their farmhouse and her nights dozing by the fire, listening to the big women yarn about life over endless cups of tea. It is a life of freedom, protection and love. But as Sunny grows she must face the challenge of being seen as different, and of having a mother whose visits are as unpredictable as the rain. Based on Jeanine Leane' s own childhood, these funny, endearing and thought-provoking stories offer a snapshot of a unique Australian upbringing.

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Jeanine Leane is a Wiradjuri woman from south-west New South Wales. A Doctorate in literature and Aboriginal representation from the University of Technology, Sydney, followed a long teaching career at secondary and tertiary level. Formerly an Indigenous Research Fellow at the Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies, she currently holds a post-doctoral fellowship at ANU. Jeanine's unpublished manuscript Purple Threads won the David Unaipon Award at the 2010 Queensland Premier's Literary Awards, and, once published, was shortlisted for the 2012 Commonwealth Book Prize. Jeanine is the recipient of an Australian Research Council grant which will produce a scholarly monograph called Reading the Nation: A critical study of Aboriginal/Settler representation in the contemporary Australian literary landscape.