Christina Stead in America
by Fiona McFarlane Christina Stead was born in Rockdale, Sydney, in 1902. Rockdale is a few stations along the Illawarra line from Hurstville, the railway station closest to my parents’ house, and I traveled through it every day as I went to and from high school. Stead sailed from Sydney to England in 1928, moved to the USA in 1937, then back to England, back to America, back to England (where her husband died), and finally, after an absence of forty-one years, returned to Sydney, where she lived in a flat above her brother’s house in Hurstville. She died in…