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Core of My Heart, My Country

Women's Sense of Place and the Land in Australia and Canada

Maggie MacKellar

A lyrical combination of history, memoir and contemplation, examining the lives of women settlers in Australia and Canada.

Opinion

“Georgia Molloy is just one of many memorable women whose stories are told in this vividly written study of women’s responses to the landscapes they encountered in Australia and Canada.”
“this is an intensely personal book”
“MacKellar’s authorial presence never overwhelms. Her crisp often lyrical prose carries the reader along at a cracking pace.”
(Kate Darian-Smith, Australian Book Review, November 2004)

“Underpinning this interesting book is the idea that bleak portrayals of outback women, such as Henry Lawson’s The Drover’s Wife, my be more mythical than factual.”
“the stories of the women are fascinating”
(Bruce Elder, Sydney Morning Herald, 4-5/12/04)

About this Title

“MacKellar makes terrifically vivid the often unsung strength of women, brave in their new worlds.”
Anna Funder

When Georgiana Molloy gave birth on the beach at Augusta in 1830 with boxes of her possessions lying where they’d landed, she was one of the many women who literally had to remake their homes out of the broken bones of their past.

In this passionate book Maggie MacKellar tells the stories of women on the frontier in Canada and Australia who ventured out in bonnets and petticoats to collect seeds, who abandoned sidesaddles to ride in the mountains, who risked their reputations to climb mountains – and beyond this it tells of the risky business of women who put their lives on the page to claim the importance of their experience.

Core of My Heart, My Country weaves together experience and insight from women who lived and wrote in different landscapes, in different climates and in different eras. It is a provocative and remarkable encounter with buried stories and persistent myths.

“Journeying between past and present, Maggie MacKellar explores the relationship between sense of the self and the sense of place. Her stories of women and the land in Canada and Australia are perceptively and movingly told.”
Brenda Niall

"Clear and lyrical, Core of My Heart, My Country, is a unique and joyous celebration of women's relationship to the land – a pleasure to read."
Georgia Blain

About the Author

Maggie MacKellar lectures in Australian and cross-cultural comparative history at the University of Sydney. In 1996 she spent three months hiking, camping and kayaking in the Alaskan wilderness with the National Outdoor Leadership School, which provided the inspiration for this book. She lives in Sydney with her two children. Core of My Heart, My Country is her first book.

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978-0-522-85137-3