Rosa Caroline Praed Notebooks

Background

Noted Queensland novelist Rosa Praed was born at Bromelton on the Logan River in 1851. The daughter of Thomas Murray-Prior and his wife Matilda, Praed spent much of her childhood on her father’s pastoral properties in the Logan and Burnett River districts and at Cleveland. Through her father’s subsequent political career she was familiar with a number of important personages, many of whom would be fictionalised in her works. In 1872 she married Arthur Campbell Praed and spent two years on her husband’s property on Curtis Island near Gladstone, a miserable experience which she incorporated into her autobiographical My Australian Girlhood (1902) and two novels. She accompanied her husband when he returned to England in 1876, and after the couple separated in 1897, she remained in England for the remainder of her life except for one brief visit to Australia in 1894-1895. Writing as Mrs Campbell Praed she produced 45 works over four decades, roughly half of which drew on her life in Australia and include many historical events in Queensland. Notwithstanding her obvious attempts at impartiality, Praed’s perspective was largely that of the elite society she knew so well.

 

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