When You See the Emu in the Sky
My Journey of Self-Discovery in the Outback
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- USD 7.99
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- USD 7.99
Publisher Description
When You See the Emu in the Sky is the journey of Elizabeth Fuller - vital, energetic, and free, yet saddled with unspoken grief. At home in Connecticut, she has remarried, happily, after the death of her first husband, and she has found success in her writing. But as her dearest friend, an actor who portrays Bette Davis on stage, begins to waste away from AIDS, a terrible loneliness stares her in the face again. Her response: to gather her twelve year old son and flee to a place she has dreamed of since childhood.
Australia represents adventure. But events, uncanny and inexplicable, soon beckon her on a trip she has made no preparation for. It is an adventure of the soul, where the signposts are a large white cockatoo, spirits who visit in the night, and a full-blooded Aborigine named Max Eulo, who becomes her friend and guide to a culture thousands of years old.
The tiny Aborigine village of Enngonia, where she is a guest, is worlds apart from everything Elizabeth has known. But when her heart seems most wrenched and she feels most out of place, she senses a gateway opening - and she enters through it. "The unknown paths are the gifts of life," an Aboriginal spirit counsels her. "Stay close to the earth and you will touch the stars."
And she does - in a journey that is comforting, transforming, and wonderful.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Although admonished by her parents and friends for leaving her second husband of only 18 months to fend for himself while she pursued an unexplained urge to visit the Outback, Fuller, a nonfiction writer (Nannies, etc.) and playwright living in New York, pulled her son out of his sixth-grade class and headed for Australia. In a rented house in Manly, she encountered Aborigine spirits in the form of strange music and footsteps in the night. A ouija board put her in touch with "Dwango," a spirit dwelling in the basement, who told her she would meet a man who would take her someplace she needed to go. Soon, Max, a full-blooded Aborigine, took Fuller and her son "Back o'Bourke" (beyond the point of no return), to the Outback where he grew up. Initially fearful, both Fuller and her son soon experienced life close to the earth, the spirits and the universe, and grew well beyond their former selves. Comparisons between this book and Marlo Morgan's Mutant Message Down Under are inevitable, but Fuller's story is more personal. Drawn to a strange, mystical world, she ended up facing the earthly realities she had feared most--her grief over her first husband's death, the bad reviews of her acting and the closing of her play, as well as the impending death from AIDS of her close friend and co-star. This tale offers readers a little adventure, a little human pathos, a little magic. Foreign rights sold in China and Italy.
