Many Burghers of the professional classes reluctantly decided to leave the beautiful island, their home for generations. If Australia was to be their new home, the émigrés, to comply with restrictive White Australia regulations, had to prove seventy-five per cent (later fifty) European heritage, and to ‘look European’. To validate applications, genealogical records held by the Dutch Burgher Union were consulted. This investigation forms the basis of Faulk’s exploration.

Faulk has a light, charming touch, but the work is a quick history of Ceylon (Sri Lanka since 1978) as much as the story of a colonial childhood. Her delight in history often escapes into irrelevance and careless research. Quentin Bell was not Virginia Woolf’s brother; Indian Marwari horses were not the ancestors of the famous Australian ‘walers’; it was the poet William Cowper, not Bishop Heber, who said ‘the cup that cheers but not inebriates’; and if Hermann Hesse arrived in Ceylon in 1911, how could he be ‘seeking respite from the horrors of the Great War’?

It is difficult to understand how the author, a former journalist, could make so many mistakes in spelling, grammar, punctuation, and repetition. The book is primarily for family and friends’. It is a pity no one proofread it carefully first.