Catherine Edith Macauley Martin

She came to Adelaide, where she befriended Catherine Helen Spence[3] and did journalistic work, including serial stories, The Moated Grange in 1877[5] and A Bohemian Born as "M.C."

[6] In 1877 she was appointed a clerk in the Education Department, an unusual job for a woman, and welcomed,[7] but lost it in 1885, three years after her marriage, a case of discrimination, suggests the Oxford Companion.

[8] Catherine and Frederick Martin undertook two extensive tours of Europe in 1890–1904 and 1904–1907, during which she wrote a series of articles, Vignettes of Travel,[9][10][11][12] for the Melbourne Age and Leader, also picked up by the (Boorowa, New South Wales) News.

[13] She drew on her travel experiences again for her next novel, The Old Roof Tree: Letters of Ishbel to Her Half-brother, Mark Latimer, a series of essays in letter-form, published in 1906.

[3] An Australian Girl has much of the flavour of George Eliot with its themes of personal loss leading to a kind of awakening in religious humanism, written by a woman of thoughtful and philosophic mind.

[3] The Incredible Journey, with its sympathetic appreciation of the point of view of two aboriginal women, Iliapo and Polde, who traverse hundreds of kilometres of desert country to rescue a boy who has been kidnapped by a white man,[3] a similar theme to Doris Pilkington Garimara's Follow the Rabbit-Proof Fence (1996) and its 2002 film adaptation Rabbit-Proof Fence by Phillip Noyce.