Uncle Henry's Hacienda - Aurora House

Uncle Henry’s Hacienda

Throughout his life, Henry Anderson, born in 1891, had one dream: to own a cattle ranch in Mexico with a beautiful hacienda. Initially he faced obstacles, but he fought furiously to win a speed typing competition in record time. With perseverance and a cool head, Henry used his prize money to invest in the oil business.

From a small farm in rural South Texas to a dusty border town in Arizona, Henry then moved to California, his finances affluent. He experienced the glitz and glamour of Hollywood in the 1920s; however, the high life soon came crashing down. No wife, no child, no money and no status. Everything was gone! His only option was the uncertain life of a prospector in the mountains of Northern Mexico.

Henry’s story includes periods of great success and abject failure as he continued to follow his dream, from mining gold, getting caught up in a Marxist revolt and suffering torture by the Mexican Federales, to rekindling his past in South Texas, where the most unexpected revelation occurred. No matter the financial or psychological torment, even in his old age, he never faltered in his search for that elusive hacienda.

Description

Charlie Stevenson was born and raised in Victoria, a small city in south-central Texas, USA. He studied at the University of Notre Dame in Indiana and then served in the US Army in Germany, and continued his studies at University College, Dublin, Ireland, and embarked on a career as a university academic.

For the next ten years, he lectured in several universities in Ireland and the north of England, specializing in Medieval English literature, the history of the English language, and Old Norse language and literature.

In 1983 he and his Irish wife Aideen moved to Australia, where he was appointed to a lectureship in the English Department at Monash University in Melbourne. In 2004 he and Aideen both took early retirements and moved to Holloways Beach, a suburb of Cairns in far north Queensland.

During the long Covid shutdown, he wrote and privately published a memoir of his time in the U.S. Army. After that, he wrote Uncle Henry’s Hacienda, his first novel. Apart from enjoying a relaxed lifestyle in the tropics, he spends his time reading, writing, working on a family history and sorting and identifying family photographs.”