The House of Blue Glass

In The House of Blue Glass, Alan Atkinson – author of the award-winning Elizabeth and John: The Macarthurs of Elizabeth Farm – explores the life of Penelope Lucas.

While she is known as the Macarthur family governess, Atkinson reveals Penelope was primarily an accountant whose bookkeeping work made an important difference to the Macarthurs’ success.

Penelope Lucas came to Australia in 1804–1805, in her thirties, unmarried and looking forward to living on inherited income. While Elizabeth Macarthur was unsurprisingly upset when John arrived back from three years in England with a woman she had never heard of, Penelope went on to live with the Macarthurs for over thirty years and became close friends with Elizabeth. In this revelatory work, Atkinson brings together fifty years of scholarship as he explores the gender dynamics of the Macarthur household and the life of a single woman of means in Georgian England and early colonial Sydney.

‘A prodigious feat of historical imagination.’ – Matthew Allen

About the author

Alan Atkinson is a historian with postgraduate degrees from the University of Sydney, University of Dublin, Trinity College, and the Australian National University. He has taught at Murdoch University, the University of Western Australia and the University of New England over a period of more than thirty years. He has been a Fulbright Scholar and a Visiting Fellow at the universities of Cambridge, London and Melbourne, and at the Australian National University. Atkinson is the author of Europeans in Australia, volumes I–III (volume III won the Victorian Prize for Literature and was shortlisted for the Prime Minister’s Prize for Australian History), and Elizabeth and John, winner of the 2023 NSW Premier's History Awards, Australian History Prize.

Alan Atkinson
Published March 2026
Paperback
368 pages 
234mm x 153mm
ISBN 9781761170379