Cassie McCullough

Yes, and certainly there's a few lines in there.

Harold Beecham kept a sniffling little Queensland black boy as a sort of black your boots, odd jobs slavey.

That was the line that sort of really... It leaps out.

Yeah, it leaps out.

But it didn't leap out when she was writing it because that was a common perception that

Similarly with issues of class, and this is a time where she's actually writing that, you know, the class gap is widening and she actually sort of speaks out against that.

But at the same time, she's very much a creature of her class and she in some ways yearns to be a peasant who doesn't know

that there is a different world and she envies the people whose life is looking at the price of sheep and butter and that's all they're interested in because they're happy and because she is not born as a member of the lower classes and she has to live in that world, she is unhappy.

It's not just about gender.

It is about class.

And ultimately, it's about incredible, miserable frustration.

Oh, look, I think that she was at the vanguard of a new form of Australian literature, and it's not... It speaks to the country in the same way that somebody like Lawson speaks to the country, but it's not so damn miserable and grouchy.

If you have a look and compare somebody like Franklin with Catherine Helen Spence, who was the first Australian female writer to write about Australia...

The voice is very different.

Spence still writes in that very mannered English style and refuses to use contractions of words like nighty or hanky because it's not the Queen's English.

And so you have this earlier generation of writers and poets as well, like Adam Lindsay Gordon, who are still trapped by the form of British writing today.

And the bulletin writers, your Pattersons and your Lawsons and indeed Franklin, who did some writing for the bulletin, were new voices.

And along with people like Joseph Furphy and CJ Dennis, they really wanted to put the Australian vernacular on the map, the way that Australian people spoke.

So one of the great things in Miles Franklin and in several of those other books is the McSwats have their own strange dialect that they speak in.

And so you really get a sense of the Australian voice from Miles's writing and that's one of the things I love about it.