| The Golden Day | |
| Author: | Ursula Dubosarsky |
| Cover Artist: | Zoë Sadokierski |
| Country: | Australia |
| Language: | English |
| Genre: | Young Adult Mystery |
| Publisher: | Allen & Unwin |
| Release Date: | 2011 |
| Isbn: | 978-1-74237-471-0 |
The Golden Day (2011) is a young adult mystery novel by Australian author Ursula Dubosarsky. The novel is set in Australia in 1967.
In a class of only eleven schoolgirls, the young and enthusiastic teacher Miss Renshaw disappears after an unexpected excursion to the Gardens. There, they meet the mysterious Morgan and take a trip into a deep, dark cave. The girls return to school that day without a teacher. And so, Miss Renshaw is declared missing while the rest of the teachers scramble to get an answer. Only, Miss Renshaw told the schoolgirls never to tell what happened that day. Bethany breaks her promise in the end under pressure from Mr Dern. Eventually a news report is released with details of Morgan's past and Miss Renshaw is declared dead.
The Golden Day is about a class of 11 girls and their teacher, Miss Renshaw. They are like a big family all perched up in a Sydney school from 1967. That year started off with a man getting hanged, the last man to be hanged in Australia, and PM Holt also went missing.
The new teacher, Miss Renshaw, loves poetry and always takes the girls put on class excursions to the park. They would meet with Morgan, the teacher's 'boyfriend', a supposed gardener and poet, who refused to go to war.
One day, they go to the park to think about death in relation to the hanging of Ronald Ryan. They meet Morgan again and he teaches them about poetry and nature. Along with Miss Renshaw, he convinces the children to go into a secret cave along the beach. On their way to the cave a naked man unexpectedly appears, staring. When they give him a second glance, he is gone.
Soon enough they are in a cave with Aboriginal Dreaming paintings along the walls and ceiling of the cave and Morgan's lecture continues. He leads them deeper in and eventually it is so dark and so cramped that one of the girls gets an asthma attack. They decide to turn back without their teacher, who in turn does not protest their leaving. In the end the teacher never comes back. After an investigation is held, they find out that Morgan is actually a criminal and he is the main suspect.
Eight years later Cubby, Icara, Martine and Bethany go to a cafe to celebrate the end of their tests when they meet Miss Renshaw again. But for some reason she is still the same, wearing exactly the same clothes as the day she disappeared. Cubby, unlike the others, knows that she is a ghost, or a spirit of some sort. This is because she wears exactly the same pendant that the police found, broken, on the cave floor.