A year before her death in 2000, Judith Wright’s autobiography Half a Lifetime was published. The phrase ‘female as I was…’ peppered her stories. Miles Franklin’s Sybylla Melvyn had been a childhood idol. Wright conceded that Sybylla’s use of a stockwhip to assert power might have seemed ‘a little over the odds’. Then: ‘but if you had to?’

Being a woman had mostly been a nuisance, as Wright told it, a roadblock that she had negotiated without much thought, in her unfussed country way. Wright’s genre-breaking family history Generations of Men (1959) had evinced a ‘subtle feminism’, wrote historian Tom Griffiths, in its awed depiction of her grandmother, who had taken control of the family’s heavily indebted pastoral properties after the death of her husband, in her forties, and secured her own and her family’s fortune – ‘her triumph’ Wright termed it.