Gone are the hijinks of previous novels - Isobel’s mild case of kleptomania, Cathy’s three-storeyed treehouse, the girls’ ghost-hunting - but in their place is deeper character development. Your heart breaks for Isobel’s “squashed voice”. Robin Klein.īy the end of the day, she is trailing Vivienne and lagging behind her now-insufferable cousins who rabbit on and on about their new school. Heather’s magnetic personality is confined to the stage, Cathy’s adroit rambling limbs to the hockey court, and even poor Isobel is a fish out of water on her visit to the city. As their physical world contracts - to a few back rooms in Captain Fuller’s house, to petty Aunt Elsa’s where they are unwelcome guests, and finally their own tiny flat - so do their movements. Vivienne’s loss of innocence happens over a gentle gradient, like the seasons changing from autumn to winter. Not to mention all the other soppy stuff about leaving Wilgawa that came earlier… If you mean rainclouds, they don’t look a bit like lace-more like dirty big chunks of steel wool.

Cathy, always to the point, finds Vivienne’s diary and mocks her for it: The “sky in silver lace” is Vivienne’s euphemistic metaphor for the encroaching hard times. As the youngest sister, she is allowed to have uncomplicated feelings of sadness and longing for Wilgawa, Klein’s fictional country town that represents the warmth of a post-war rural community. ‘Dirty big chunks of steel wool’Īs she was in the first books of the trilogy, Vivienne is the heartbeat of this novel. Even when they visit the city centre, they find it to be a hostile place, peopled by mean relatives, expensive shops and unfriendly characters. However, city life confines the Mellings to those far-flung suburbs without community, and the girls have never felt so alienated. They invent games, make things, write stories. Instead of making them insipid whiners, the girls’ desire for material things is the catalyst for their resourcefulness, self-agency, energy, inventiveness and even charity. Yet their longings bring vast ingenuity and insight into their lives. To now be the recipients of charity-second-hand discounted uniforms, lodgings, a housing-commission flat-deeply wounds the collective pride of the Melling sisters. Phyllis does not make an appearance in this book, now that the Mellings have moved to the city, but her legacy lingers. Back in the country town, the Mellings were poor but not as poor as the Gathins. Phyllis’ character contained all that was true and devastating about the forced humility of the destitute. In all the years since my first reading, there was a peripheral character I never forgot, not her name, appearance or her circumstances: Phyllis Gathin. It reminds me now, as an adult, that no matter how genteel our veneer, we are all come from a history of feral battlers just trying to make it. In fact, with its cast of supercilious relatives, its small-town scuttlebutting and girlish rivalries, Klein’s trilogy resonated strongly with me, an Asian girl with refugee parents growing up in the 1980s and 1990s. Unlike the Marches or Bennetts, however, there is no superimposed didactic altruism in Klein’s Melling sisters: she depicts their secret selfish longings and embarrassments of poverty with such honesty that you can’t help rooting for these girls. There is Grace the beauty, Cathy the tomboy, Heather the performer and Vivienne the dreamer, all growing up in an Australia that has just seen the Great Depression and two world wars. The Melling sisters - like Alcott’s March sisters and Austen’s Bennett sisters - are a quartet of girls who become women during the course of tribulation. More so than any other contemporary “teenage girl fiction” of the time, Robin Klein’s trilogy conveyed for me most accurately and achingly, the transition from girlhood to young adulthood, from naïve hope to acute awareness of one’s class and circumstances. I missed my librarian friend, our Book Week dress-ups, and the innocence of those earlier days. Finally, when I read The Sky in Silver Lace at 16, I remember the curious melancholy I felt long afterwards.īy then I was at my fourth school in five years, a selective-entry, all-girls high school in the city, not all that different from Cathy and Heather Melling’s. She put it on reserve for me, and I read Dresses of Red and Gold when I was 13. I can still remember reading All in the Blue Unclouded Weather when I was 12, and then the excitement I felt when the librarian at our tiny Catholic school, Mrs Kerr, told me that there was a sequel.

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