Stella Maraia Sarah Miles Franklin was an Australian novelist. A sound chronicler and a satirist, she wrote with a sure but sensitive touch on the theme of her country's pioneer settlers.
Background
She was born in Talbingo on Oct. 14, 1879. She absorbed the lore of the upland grazing country before her father became a homesteader in 1891 and began dairy farming near Goulburn, where she attended public school and came
to be more directly influenced by the emerging nationalism.
Career
Franklin's first novel, My Brilliant Career, was written in its original version when she was 16. Then she worked as a a free-lance journalist for the number of magazines and newspapers. Franklin moved to the United States in 1902. In Chicago she undertook social work with the National Women's Trade Union League and its journal, Life and Labor. After visiting Australia briefly in 1924, Franklin wrote three "photographic" novels of bush pioneering, Up the Country (1928), Ten Creeks Run (1930), and Back to Bool Bool (1931), all published under the pen name "Brent of Bin Bin." The third of the trio had a message in contemporary social problems. A humorous story of homestead-farm life, Old Blastus of Bandicoot, appeared under her own name in 1931. In 1933 Franklin returned to live in Australia, and in 1936 her most widely acclaimed novel, All That Swagger, was published. Franklin's later writing included a literary biography, Joseph Furphy: The Legend of a Man and His Book. Three "Brent of Bin Bin" books - Prelude to Waking, Cockatoos, and Gentlemen at Gyang Gyang--were published in the early 1950s.