4 ideas
On a holiday at Yarrahappini, the family's country station, thirteen-year-old Judy Woolcot, the wildest and most punished of the children, sees a felled gum tree coming down on her baby brother, the General. She throws herself over him and is crushed.
Captain Woolcot sends Judy to a boarding school in the Blue Mountains as punishment. Her siblings hide her in the loft, where she falls seriously ill, and the illness leaves her weakened. The father's punishment by exile produces the physical damage his discipline was meant to prevent.
The book states outright that none of its seven children is really good, because real Australian children never are. It sets itself against the moral tale, in which virtue is rewarded and naughtiness corrected.
The household sits between two failed kinds of authority. The father's is harsh but distant: he rules by punishment, favours one child, and is rarely present. The stepmother's is affectionate but powerless: at twenty she is barely older than the eldest children and more playmate than parent. With nobody holding authority the children both respect and feel close to, they effectively raise each other, and the eldest siblings, especially Judy, become the real centre of the family.