Every Australian knows My Country, the poem that made Dorothea Mackellar famous at a young age. But very few people know much about her life.

In Her Sunburnt Country: The Extraordinary Literary Life of Dorothea Mackellar, biographer Deborah Fitzgerald was approached by her descendants and given unprecedented access to her papers, including a diary she wrote in code. What secret loves was she hiding and protecting? And why did this privileged, beautiful, intelligent and eligible young woman never marry?

This is the remarkable and until now untold story of an independent free-spirited woman who lived on her own terms, with her closest companion and creative soul mate.

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