Meeting fee of $2 per person for members or $5 per person for visitors, which includes afternoon tea. For those members that have paid the year’s meeting fees in advance with their 2025 membership there is no fee due. Please remember to bring cash for the raffle and trading table.

The Resource Room will have digital resources only while we are meeting in the church.

Door is open from 12noon and the general meeting starts at 1:15pm. The speaker is Patricia Sumerling and the subject is her book The Noon Lady if Towitta. Patricia is an Adelaide-based professional historian who believes some of the unresolved tales she comes across in her work are ripe for unravelling and for imaginative reconstruction as distinctively South Australian stories.

https://www.wakefieldpress.com.au/product/the-noon-lady-of-towitta/

The Noon Lady of Towitta
A mystery

PATRICIA SUMERLING

Bertha Schippan, beautiful but headstrong daughter of a Wendish-German family, is murdered on New Year’s Day, 1902.

A posse of Adelaide police arrive at the family’s lonely Murray Flats farm thirty-six hours later, but by the time an Aboriginal tracker can start his work, a gale has blown all clues away. An inquest sends her elder sister Mary to trial. But why would she kill Bertha when everyone knew them as loving companions?

The Noon Lady of Towitta, a novel based on real events, entwines fact and folktale to delve into the secrets of a family haunted by its past and ruled by a devout and tyrannical father.