My Relations: by Robin Ann Eakin, aged 8, 1929

In 1929 an eight-year-old child, who had very few relations, imagined an assortment of eccentric aunts, uncles and cousins. She wrote and illustrated a little book about them, which her grandmother kept.

This is it.

Robin Dalton was born Robin Eakin in Sydney in 1920, and has lived in London since 1946. She has been a television performer, an intelligence agent, a literary agent and a film producer (Madame Souzatska starring Shirley Maclaine; Oscar and Lucinda starring Cate Blanchett), as well as an author. Her 1965 account of her childhood in Kings Cross, Aunts Up the Cross, remains an Australian classic. Both Aunts Up the Cross and Dalton's previously unpublished childhood novel My Relations will be released by Text Publishing in 2015.