The Monthly, February 2009, No. 42

In February 1904, Stella Miles Franklin – then aged 24 – received an admiring letter from a 60-year-old former bullock-driver named Joseph Furphy. He requested a photograph and proposed that they meet.

My Brilliant Career, Franklin’s semi-autobiographical novel about a spirited teenager’s rebellion against stultifying convention, had appeared three years earlier. It was the only Australian novel published in the year of Federation. Described with pride by Henry Lawson in the preface as “just a little bush girl”, Franklin was being hailed by the leading...