FIRST FRIDAY BOOKCLUB | Her Sunburnt Country by Deborah Fitzgerald

Join The Friends for another lively First Friday Book Club.

Poet Dorothea McKellar’s poem, My Country, was first published in 1908 in London. Battling against a masculine tradition of Australian bush poetry led by Banjo Paterson and Henry Lawson, she boldly carved out a place for herself, leaving an indelible mark on the Australian imagination. At 22 she won literary fame and had a close friendship with Joseph Conrad, engaging with the intellectual elite of Sydney and abroad as she embarked on a decades-long literary career that saw her linked to some of the leading lights of her day.

In Her Sunburnt Country, now, for the first time, the poet's unconventional life story is told, a hidden gem of Australian history, and a tale of one woman’s extraordinary passion for her poetry, her family and her country. Deborah Fitzgerald draws on the extensive Mitchell Library archive to give us an objective and illuminating portrait of the privileged, contradictory and sometimes very unhappy life of this Australian poet who died in 1968.

Deborah Fitzgerald, Her Sunburnt Country, The Extraordinary Life of Dorothea Mackellar, Simon & Schuster Australia 2023

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