Blue stocking in Patagonia

Mary Cameron was self-confident, an aspirant writer and feminist - but she also took with her white muslin for a wedding dress; and she married a near illiterate shearer William Gilmore. Their socialist dream foundered before very long and they had to earn their passage home with their baby son - through the impossibly remote country communities of Paraguay and the vast estancias of Argentina to Patagonia, the 'end of the earth' made famous by Darwin and Bruce Chatwin. Anne Whitehead brilliantly counterpoints her own wanderings with Mary's. After seven years in South America the Gilmores sailed home. Poet and national icon, Mary Gilmore's portrait now graces the Australian $ 10 note. "This splendid and fascinating book is brillantly balanced as part memoir, part well-researched recreation of the experiences of the young Mary Gilmore as inamorata of Henry Lawson, as radical, as wife, Paraguayan and Patagonian settler, and as abidingly Australian soul"--Thomas Keneally (p. 4 of cover). "A century ago, in a bizarre social experiment, a band of over 500 Australians - mostly men and just three single women - sailed out to found a socialist Utopia in Paraguay. One of them was red-headed schoolteacher - the intrepid Mary Cameron. In a remarkable blend of biography and travel writing Anne Whitehead follows in her footsteps in South America, and brings to life a testing time spent in one of the harshest places on earth."--Cover.