6 h 29 minAudiobook14 minSummaryRead it, hear it, the 15-minute summary, and print and large print at cost
Audiobook edition · 6 h 29 minPaperback · 6 × 9 in · printing soonHardcover · 6 × 9 in · printing soonAbout this book
What does a person do when the country is hard, help is far away, and choices cannot be undone?
In The Moving Finger, Mary Gaunt brings together seven short tales of the Australian frontier. The bush, its settlers and the people passing through it form a world where love and survival meet the pressure of fate. This is frontier life seen through human needs, not a postcard of the country.
Gaunt grows up in a Victorian country town, close to the meeting of law and land. Her stories invite you to consider ordinary people under pressure: distance, weather, money and loneliness. The title echoes the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam and its image of writing that no human effort can call back or change.
What you’ll discover
- The frontier as a test Explore hard country through the question of what people do when help is far away.
- Love beside survival Discover tales that place love alongside the demands of survival on the Australian frontier.
- The weight of fate Consider the title’s unsettling idea: some things cannot be called back or changed.
- A plain human view Look beyond a postcard of the bush to its settlers and the people passing through.
- Stories for one sitting Spend time with short tales whose longer, more formal sentences invite a quieter reading pace.
Who will love it
You will enjoy this if you like short stories with a vivid sense of place, tales of the bush and the goldfields, and a plain, warm storyteller's voice.
What’s inside
The key ideas, in the 15-minute summary
- A girl at a waterhole loves the wrong man
- A refused suitor and a girl's night ride
- Two men lose their way in the desert
- A sailor leaves the girl he cannot win
- A hutkeeper who depends on a careless man
- An old woman explains why she never married
- A young digger cooks his first Christmas dinner
- One act cannot be called back
- Loneliness shapes love, class and risk
- Spoken voices and repeated words carry the tales
Who’s who
- Nellie DurhamA gentle, simple girl at a lonely waterhole who loves a bushranger and wants only to keep him safe.
- Bessie WarnerA pretty station girl bored with hill life, who must find the courage to ride through the night for help.
- Tom HollisA loyal neighbour who loves Bessie and will risk anything to see her safe.
- AndersonAn old bushman lost in the desert, who thinks of his crippled little son and tries to keep a younger man alive.
- Ben HarperA well-read second mate who loves Susy Mackie and cannot share the faith she holds.
- Susy MackieA Puritan farm girl torn between her love for a sailor and the creed her father taught her.
- KittyA mixed-race hutkeeper who belongs to neither the station nor the camp and clings to the one man who keeps her.
- Hope FordeAn old woman who tells her niece of the poor overseer she loved and the race that decided her life.
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The Moving Finger
by Mary Gaunt · 1895
A girl rides a stolen horse through the dark to save the man she loves in seven tales of the Australian bush.
Easy read5–10 hours to readEnglish
Excellent
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In short
Picture a coach rolling through the dark over flooded plains, with a driver who swears at the road, the horses and the foolishness of women while he tells a ghost story. That is how The Moving Finger begins.
The Moving Finger at a glance
- Reading time
- About 3 h 45 min2 h 55 min fast, 4 h 25 min slow
- Length
- 53,200 words
- Library level
- Easy short sentences, plain words
- First published
- 1895by Mary Gaunt
Reading time at 238 words a minute (fast 300, slow 200). How long the classics take to read · Updated
From the 15-minute summary · Key idea 1
A girl at a waterhole loves the wrong man
The first tale comes from a coach driver on the stock route between Hay and Deniliquin. Murwidgee Waterhole lies in a deep crack in a grey, shadeless plain. Old Durham and his wife sell liquor there without a licence, and their grandsons steal a few cattle from every herd that passes.
Their granddaughter Nellie is pretty, gentle and a little simple. She loves Gentleman Jim, an escaped convict and bushranger who speaks like an educated man. Her grandmother reads death in the cards. When Jim learns that Ben Fisher, a foreman, wants to marry Nellie, he swears to kill her if she goes near the man. Nellie kisses his hand, because his anger looks to her like love.
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Which edition is right for me
- 15-minute summary
- The key ideas of the whole book in about 14 minutes. A good first look, or a refresher.
Details
- First published
- 1895
- Language
- English
- Reading time
- 4 h 10 min
- Level
- Easy read
Cite this edition
Gaunt, Mary. The Moving Finger. Library of Alexandria, 2026, libraryofalexandria.com/products/the-moving-finger.
Gaunt, M. (2026). The moving finger. Library of Alexandria. https://libraryofalexandria.com/products/the-moving-finger (Original work published 1895)
Gaunt, Mary. The Moving Finger. Library of Alexandria, 2026. https://libraryofalexandria.com/products/the-moving-finger.
@book{gaunt2026moving,
author = {Gaunt, Mary},
title = {The Moving Finger},
publisher = {Library of Alexandria},
year = {2026},
url = {https://libraryofalexandria.com/products/the-moving-finger},
note = {First published 1895}
}
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What is The Moving Finger about?
It is a collection of seven stories set in the Australian bush in colonial times. They cover a bushranger's sweetheart, a hostage rescue at Christmas, lost explorers, a wreck on a stormy coast, a hutkeeper on a lonely plain, a steeplechase and a digger's Christmas.
What does the title The Moving Finger mean?
The title comes from the verse printed at the start, which says that a moving finger writes and then moves on, and that no piety, wit or tears can cancel what it has written. Each story turns on an act that cannot be undone.
Who wrote The Moving Finger and when is it set?
Mary Gaunt, an Australian writer who died in 1942, wrote the stories. They are fiction set in the colonial period, from the days of the goldfields in the 1850s onward, on stations, diggings, plains and the southern coast.
The author
Mary Gaunt
1861–1942 · Australian novelist and travel writer
Mary Gaunt was an Australian writer born in Victoria in 1861. She wrote novels, short stories and travel books in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Her short-story collection The Moving Finger appeared in 1895. She lived in Australia, England and Italy, and died in Cannes, France, in 1942.
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