My Brilliant Career is a 1901 novel by Miles Franklin which was made into a brilliant movie about a young woman coming of age in Australia. It is a much loved and remarkable book written when the author was a teenager.
My first impression of Possum Gully was bitter disappointment--an impression which time has failed to soften or wipe away. How flat, common, and monotonous the scenery appeared after the rugged peaks of the Timlinbilly Range!
Yes, somewhere named Possum Gully would probably make you long for Timlinbilly Range . . .
There was a third part in me which cried out to be fed. I longed for the arts. Music was a passion with me. I borrowed every book in the neighbourhood and stole hours from rest to read them. This told upon me and made my physical burdens harder for me than for other children of my years around me. That third was the strongest part of me. In it I lived a dream-life with writers, artists, and musicians. Hope, sweet, cruel, delusive Hope, whispered in my ear that life was long with much by and by, and in that by and by my dream-life would be real. So on I went with that gleaming lake in the distance beckoning me to come and sail on its silver waters, and Inexperience, conceited, blind Inexperience, failing to show the impassable pit between it and me.
To return to the dairying.
This is a heroine you can get behind and root for! A remarkable writer for her age, she still writes for our age over one hundred years later.
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