"There is something bigger than fact: the underlying spirit, all it stands for, the mood, the vastness, the wilderness, the Western breath of go-to-the-devil-if-you-don't-like-it, the eternal big spaceness of it. Oh the West! I'm of it and I love it!" "Contrary from the start" was the way Emily Carr described herself in her autobiography. She was a naughty child, an impatient and rebellious young girl, and a young woman who scorned the tidy conventions of the very proper Victorian society of Victoria, British Columbia.