Beyond Australia by Lee Forest
“Beyond Australia is a lovely time capsule, allowing us to slip into life in 1872’s New York City for a visceral sense of the gritty and turbulent experience that was life in the United States before modern times. “
Beyond Australia is an engaging young-adult novel about an inquisitive teenaged girl who bravely undergoes time travel in the hope of saving her ailing grandfather. This is a first work of fiction for research scientist Lee Forrest, whose empirical training shows up throughout the story in its precisely detailed historical setting and well-crafted plot. With strong pacing and rich historical context, this is an engrossing, informative read.
A Dangerous Journey into the Unknown
The novel opens as fourteen-year-old Susan Ferguson is boarding a train for a visit to her maternal grandfather at his ancestral home in Manhattan. In her mind she’s running away for good, from a “stuffy town in upstate New York which nobody ever heard of” to New York City, where she already spent a summer with Gramps two years before, while her parents went through a divorce. Now, in the wake of her dad skipping their yearly outing to Six Flags and her mother more annoying each day, Gramps is “the only player left on my team.”
But Gramps is not himself. He’s had spells of confusion and dizziness ever since handling the dissecting tools of his physician great-great-grandfather Doctor James Bentley Northrup, first in the family to live in this house. Historian by trade, Gramps has dug into Northrup’s medical logbook and found a patient named Micah E. Gaffney who died in 1872 from the exact same symptoms Gramps now has. This is worrisome enough to Susan but there’s more. Gramps tells her he’s recently time-travelled back to 1872, so he could retrieve Micah Gaffney’s brain and use it to diagnose himself. He managed to get to 1872 but couldn’t find the brain. Now he’s too confused to return.
Susan is worried and skeptical. “Pretty soon, this time or another, I was going to have to tell my very favorite person that his case was hopeless.” Nonetheless, she gives it a try. Climbing into the “long old linen chest that Doc (Northrop) made out of a Civil War rifle box” she waits and waits.
And it works! She gets to 1872 but complications ensue. No young girl in 1872 wears jeans, a button-down shirt and shag haircut. So she pretends she’s a boy. Her southern accent puts people off (the Civil War has only ended seven years earlier) so she claims to be newly arrived from Australia with a father who’s gone missing. But more problems ensue, on top of her realization that Micah dies on 20 November and it’s only 18 October. Will a scrappy newsboy and the capable but elusive Victoria Woodhull (drawn from real life, Woodhull was New York’s first female stock broker and an actual presidential candidate in 1872) be enough to get the brain back to Gramps in time?
The Choice That Could Rewrite History Forever
Forrest has chosen the 1870s as his point of time travel for an interesting reason: he considers it the last period before modern times, when the world grew more connected and more hygienic. He notes that three inventions — the telephone in 1876, a bicycle with two same-size wheels in 1885 and the trolley in 1888 — enabled rapid communication between people. The 1885 invention of linotype allowed for almost hourly national news, further connecting us all. And while an English surgeon began a campaign for better antiseptic measures in 1872, most people in the 1870s were ignorant of the many ways infections were caught, including from doctors. For Susan Ferguson it becomes one of the many ethical issues she must face as she encounters her clueless ancestors: if she intervenes in their medical care, it could change who lives and who dies, to the point of her own birth not even happening. Yet if she says nothing, the people she has come to know and like may die.
Susan’s own musings and her conversations comparing modern life to 1872 are substantive and thought-provoking. Regarding women’s rights Victorian style, she asks her ancestor Anne Northrup why men and women shouldn’t share power equally and Anne finds the answer odd.
“But that’s just how a man would look at it. Maybe I can never explain it to you … It’s not power that’s important … My mother once said it was like … you and a horse. A horse is more powerful than you. But you can learn to guide him … He goes where you ask him with just the slightest tug, because he trusts you.”
Beyond Australia is a lovely time capsule, allowing us to slip into life in 1872’s New York City for a visceral sense of the gritty and turbulent experience that was life in the United States before modern times.
About Lee Forrest:
Lee Forrest is the pen name of a research scientist and published author with works featured by Cambridge University Press. Beyond Australia is their fiction debut, blending meticulous historical research with an engaging time-travel adventure. Fascinated by the 1870s, Forrest explores the era’s medical and technological shifts, revealing a world on the cusp of modernity.
Publish Date: 3/14/2025
Genre: Young Adult
Author: Lee Forest
Page Count: 270 pages
Publisher: Lamp Light Press
ISBN: B0DSJRJXP6