Traumzeit

Young American Joanna Drury grows up in Texas with her mother, who instills in her a love of herbs and healing. When her mother dies suddenly, Joanna finds among her belongings a diary and letters that point to Australia—a continent she has never visited but seems to have deeply affected her. In 1871, she sets off for Melbourne in search of answers about her own origins.

Her research takes her to tropical northern Australia, to the sugarcane plantation of the wealthy Westbrook family. There, she meets Erik Westbrook, a charming farmer, and his mute nephew Adam, a boy who is plagued by unexplained seizures. Joanna befriends the boy and begins to treat him with herbs, but Erik's fiancée Pauline looks on with distrust.

An Aboriginal elder senses a curse on Joanna—an ancient, unexplained one—that begins to cause ominous phenomena. Joanna gradually discovers that her mother's dreams were connected to a forgotten family secret deeply rooted in Aboriginal culture and the continent's colonial past. On her own dream journey, she confronts the legacy, hatred and prejudice of white settlers towards the natives, and her own role in that history.

Barbara Wood skillfully weaves a love story, a family mystery, and the spiritual dimension of Aboriginal "dreaming" into a compelling fresco of colonial Australia.