Build a movie plot around this: Where is Sybylla growing up? Rural Austraiia
Answer:
The heroine, Sybylla Melvyn, is an imaginative, headstrong girl growing up in rural Australia in the 1890s. Drought and a series of poor business decisions reduce her family to subsistance level, her father begins to drink excessively, and Sybylla struggles to deal with the monotony of her life. To her relief, she is sent to live on her grandmother's property, where life is more comfortable. There she meets wealthy young Harry Beecham, who loves her and proposes marriage; convinced of her ugliness and aware of her tomboyish ways, Sybylla is unable to believe that he could really love her. By this time, her father's drinking has got the family into debt, and she is sent to work as governess/housekeeper for the family of an almost illiterate neighbour to whom her father owes money. She becomes acclaimated to this life to the point where it is almost bearable, but to her relief (again) is sent home (this time) to keep her away from her crass employer's son who has apparantely fallen for her (and, ironically, since she has no property, she is deemed unsuitable as the son's mate). When Harry Beecham returns to ask Sybylla to marry him, she concludes that she would only make him unhappy and sends him away, determined to pursue her career as a writer. The movie ending completes the suggestion, made at the begining, that this entire screenplay is based on her first book, as we see her putting the manuscript in a mailbox in front of her parent's ramshacle house. (A suggestion that this movie is the story of her Brilliant Career.....or how it got its start anyway).