Maggie Brooke

Stella and the Elephant Maggie Brooke

When Stella Stardust, a ten-year-old girl from northern New South Wales in 1875, was born the mysterious Aboriginal midwife who delivered her placed a strange-smelling amulet around her neck, for a 'special child'. Fortune, the oldest elephant in captivity in the Southern Hemisphere, has been with The Amazing Travelling Stardust Circus for most of his life but wants to return to Africa so he can die there. The night they meet he and Stella save the townspeople from a burning Big Top and Stella discovers that she can talk to animals at night. She hears Fortune's plea and the adventure begins. Girl and elephant stowaway on a three-masted schooner. They encounter hunger, thirst, pirates, slavers and wild animals as they trek across wild seas and into deepest Africa. They find Fortune's family and then they set off once again. Fortune goes to the elephant's graveyard to die, leaving Stella alone in the middle of Africa, to find her own way home to her own family.