Biography

CALL OF THE OUTBACK: THE REMARKABLE STORY OF ERNESTINE HILL, NOMAD, ADVENTURER AND TRAILBLAZER by Marianne van Velzen

Item: CALL OF THE OUTBACK: THE REMARKABLE STORY OF ERNESTINE HILL, NOMAD, ADVENTURER AND TRAILBLAZER
Author: Susan Sheridan

by Susan Sheridan •

April 2016, no. 380

Allen & Unwin, $32.99 pb, 320 pp, 9781760290597

Biography

CALL OF THE OUTBACK: THE REMARKABLE STORY OF ERNESTINE HILL, NOMAD, ADVENTURER AND TRAILBLAZER by Marianne van Velzen

by Susan Sheridan •

April 2016, no. 380

The long subtitle of this biography says it all. Hill was an immensely popular and influential travel writer in the 1930s and 1940s. Her books The Great Australian Loneliness (1937) and The Territory (1951) gathered together and built on the many stories she had written for city newspapers. She also published histories of the flying doctor medical service (Flying Doctor Calling, 1947) and of the dried fruit industry along the Murray River (Water into Gold, 1937). Her novel based on the life of Matthew Flinders, My Love Must Wait (1941), sold more than 100,000 copies, a record at the time for an Australian-authored book published in Australia.

Susan Sheridan

Susan Sheridan FAHA is Emeritus Professor in the School of Humanities at Flinders University in Adelaide. Her latest book is The Fiction of Thea Astley (2016). Earlier books include: Nine Lives: Postwar Women Writers Making Their Mark (2011), Christina Stead (1988), Along the Faultlines: Sex, Race and Nation in Australian Women’s Writing 1880s to 1930s (1995), and Who Was That Woman? The Australian Women’s Weekly in the Postwar Years (2002); as editor, Grafts: Feminist Cultural Criticism (1988), Debutante Nation: Feminism Contests the 1890s (1993) with Sue Rowley and Susan Magarey, and Thea Astley’s Fictional Worlds (2006), with Paul Genoni.