Maggie McKellar

And I think one of the fascinating things about her is that she wrote, one of her pseudonyms was Brent of Binbin, and she wrote nearly all of the Brent of Binbin novels, which are set sort of exclusively in pastoral Australia, from the British Library, which I think is just part of her, the contradictions of her.

I think so, and I think that it's so interesting how we've talked about class and racism and how Miles' feminism comes up against that because in lots of ways it's a study of how women's entrapment

was played out across every class of woman in the book.

No woman in the book is free.

Yes.

She was happy in her ignorance.

Yes, yes, that's exactly right.

There's a lovely line where she talks about, she describes Sabella's mother, Miles describes Sabella's mother as the polish has worn off her mother by the years and years of scrubbing.

And I just thought the way that she describes domestic labour,

It felt like eerie parallels in my life.

They cross time.

totally significant.

I think My Brilliant Career does the thing that brings together both the romance of the Australian bush and the harsh reality of drought, which is in the one book.

And I think she does, she's drawing Australia for us and she's

for an audience that hadn't been able to see it.

So she's kind of giving them a space to imagine themselves as a nation.

Yeah, I think she's really significant.

And the fact that she's so passionately Australian on her travels in America and in London and in the bequeathing of

the prize that celebrates Australian literature and Australian subject matter is just, it's such an amazing legacy.

So yeah, I think despite the limitations of this book and how much it is also a product of the time it was written in, it's really an important stepping stone into a book that we talked about earlier, like The Yield.