Stella Maria Sarah Miles Franklin was born in the foothills of the Snowy Mountains, and there lived a rough life as a settler's daughter. Growing up an avid reader, by her late teens she was writing her own stories.
My Brilliant Career, her first novel, is the story of Sybylla, whose family move from the Snowy Mountains to Possum Gully near Goulburn, where her father begins a career speculating in stock. Long years of struggle follow.
Steeped in the landscape of Southern New South Wales, few books before or since have explored so thoroughly how the cycles of flood and drought take their toll on rural families.