Core of My Heart, My Country

A small format but quite thick and heavy paperback. Packed with real stories of pioneering women. An excellent gift for yourself or for someone special who appreciates and is inspired by women's role in society and those that had the courage and spirit to create new lives on the wild frontiers.

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.

Author Biography: Maggie MacKellar lectures in Australian and cross-cultural comparative history at the University of Sydney. In she spent three months hiking, camping and kayaking in the Alaskan wilderness with the National Outdoor Leadership School, which provided the inspiration for this book. She lives in Sydney with her two children. Core of My Heart, My Country is her first book.

Reviews:

'MacKellar makes terrifically vivid the often unsung strength of women, brave in their new worlds.' Anna Funder

'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 Hall