Ethel Turner wrote Seven Little Australians in a house just up the road from me. “Well, bully for you.” That’s a voice in my head talking. But it’s not my voice; it’s the voice of that practised spiritual ventriloquist, and my old adversary—the Great Australian Put-Downer. My own voice is silent. But, just on the quiet, I’m happy to know that this girl, then in her early twenties, lived at “Inglewood” between 1891 and 1894, before her family moved round the corner to another house even closer to where I’m living. Her novels had come to me early in life,…