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.
Contents:
Dedication
Acknowledgements
Into the Wild
Chapter 1. The Broken Bones of Home (Georgiana Molloy and Mary O'Brien)
Chapter 2. Looking Through the Fawnskin Window (Susan Allison and Marie Rose Smith)
Chapter 3. Jumping the Fence (Alice Duncan Kemo, Monica Hopkins and Mary Percy Jackson)
Chapter 4. Cutting Steps (Freda Du Faur and Mary Schaffer Warren)
Chapter 5. Speaking to Earth (Elyne Mitchell)
Core of My Heart
Notes
List of Illustrations
Select BibliographyReview:
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
"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
"MacKellar makes terrifically vivid the often unsung strength of women, brave in their new worlds - Anna Funder
