Cassie McCullough

So I thought I really have to hook the reader.

It's taken up half my heart, you know.

Well, it was really, I mean, from the sort of mid to late 1880s, you've got this explosion in self-consciously and distinctly Australian literature and poetry that is finding a distinctive Australian voice rather than trying to emulate the form of some of the English writers.

And I think that Franklin absolutely nails that with her description of characters and her description of country.

And she also captures the incredible...

that was present in the 1890s, both with the Depression and she talks about the tramps coming and being fed on her grandmother's property, the drought and how, you know, that made her...

her parents' life, that made Sibylla's parents' life even harder.

So you really get that sense that these were both transformative times and also very, very hard times in which the book is set.

Well, I'm currently researching Louisa Lawson at the moment, that sort of great towering figure of the Australian women's right and suffrage movement and Henry Lawson's mum.

And I can see an incredible large number of parallels, not least the incredibly difficult

relationship that Louisa Lawson had with her mother.

And you get this in one of the most interesting things I think about my brilliant career is the very sort of the poisoned well that is the relationship between mother and daughter.

And because I suppose I'm researching women's rights at the back end of the 19th century at the moment,

It's very useful in reinforcing just how difficult it was in many ways being a woman.

The line that captured me the most is how Sibylla describes it, a woman who wants more than wealth and status offers her.

She wrote, she is not merely a creature out of her sphere, she is a creature without a sphere.

a lonely being so the whole notion of women being kept in the domestic sphere and not allowed out into the public sphere is sort of central to much of the sort of women's rights debates the back end of the 19th century and what i get from reading it is here is a girl who's who's who's trapped by

her gender prevents her from fulfilling her ambition and utilising her talents.

And that is a story that I've been reading a lot about lately.

And much of that still continues today.