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Sybylla is sent to live with her grandmother and aunt on a property that sounds like the Australian settler’s holy land, all flowing streams and lush ferns and the warble of birdsong.Ī former journalist, Park turned to fiction after her children were born and was 28 when The Harp In The South was published. She grows up on a lush property in NSW until her father buys drought-stricken land in Possum Gully and gambles and drinks away the family’s earnings. Sybylla is a bundle of contradictions: a charming tomboy who likes to wear a pretty dress, a self-pitying soul yearning to be loved, yet shunning romance when it presents itself. Henry Lawson himself described My Brillant Career thusly: “the descriptions of bush life and scenery came startlingly, painfully real to me, and I know that, as far as they are concerned, the book is true to Australia – the truest I ever read.” Stella Maria Sarah Miles Franklin wrote My Brilliant Career when she was only 16 years old, and in doing so she gifted us with a character many suspected was autobiographical: Sybylla Melvyn, a flighty, tempestuous, cynical, funny girl born well before her time, a heroine railing against the social mores of 1890s landholding society in Australia. By Miles Franklin (Text Classics, 2012) first published in 1901