Maggie MacKellar

It was at that moment that I knew the newsletter had crossed over from a curious experiment into a practice that was integral to who I was as a writer.

I write in my journal the list of jobs for the week. Then I read from Mary Oliver’s Poetry Handbook: ‘The most important point in the line is the end of the line. The second most important point is the beginning of it.’I make a note.

A track is memory. A track is relief. A track is company. A track is faith.

I thought we’d be a good match, Miles and I. We share a background – we’re both writers, both country girls, both have the love of silence and horses and a tendency to romanticize these things. I recognize her ambition and I relate to her disappointments and her isolation. I thought the idea of fictionalizing her fictional autobiography, to fictionalize her historical self had merit.

What I missed in labeling Miss Spence a campaigner first and a novelist as an afterthought was that her primary ambition was as a writer. It was only after her writing failed to find an audience that she moved away from it toward journalism and lecturing. My experience with her novels is typical. There’s a silence around reading nineteenth-century women writers – not many people do it and if they do they are most likely specialists on Spence and her founding role in the history of Australian feminism.