Core of My Heart My Country

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

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.