[1][2] Her father died when Baker was only 3 months old, and the family subsequently moved to Williamstown, Victoria, in 1870 to live with Catherire's sister, who was the wife of the then mayor, Edward Crane.

[5] The encounter made a lasting impression on Baker, who later recalled to reporter J. K. Ewers that Furphy "had much the same style in speaking as in writing, discursive, breaking into side issues, but ever returning to the main topic", and that "at the time of meeting him I compared him in my mind to the gentle scholar in Longfellow's Tales of a Wayside Inn.

[8] Furphy and Baker's remained in frequent correspondence, and at some point he resumed annual visits to Melbourne to see them until the end of 1903 when he moved across the country to Swanbourne, near in Perth.

[1] In 1889, after much encouragement by Baker and his friend and fellow blacksmith, William Cathels, Furphy submitted his work Such Is Life to The Bulletin under the pseudonym Tom Collins.

An abridged version was published in 1903 to disappointing sales,[10] but a section that had been excised enjoyed greater success serialized in the Barrier Truth between 1905 and 1907 under the title Rigby's Romance.

[13][14][clarification needed] Between 1915 and 1918, Baker recommenced teaching at a number of country schools and would occasionally tutor students, despite an accelerated loss of hearing.

A review in The Socialist by William John Miles appearing some five years after the edition's release was pointed about the lack of publicity around the work.

[16] Palmer responded to Miles's criticisms in an open letter, which he concluded by noting that "probably Joseph Furphy's work would have been left for some antiquarian in the Mitchell Library to unearth if it had not been for the enlightened energy of Miss Kate Baker" and that "not all writers are lucky enough to have such a devoted friend to act as their literary trustee.

[19] The edition came with an introduction from A. G. Stevens, who had originally positively reviewed but declined to publish Such Is Life until the section that formed Rigby’s Romance was excised.

[21] In November 1929, J. K. Ewers wrote a series of articles about Australian authors entitled "Pioneers of the Pen",[9] his piece on Furphy reached Baker and she struck up a correspondence with him.

[13] Her campaign was successful and in 1934 the plaque was unveiled at a ceremony accompanied by Furphy's sister Annie Stewart and a number of dignitaries, including the Speaker of the Victorian Legislative Assembly, William Hugh Everard.

[24] In March 1937 an abridged version of Such as Life was published in London by Jonathan Cape, and almost immediately met with a storm of criticism in Australia.

[26] Miles Franklin was no less cutting, writing in The Bulletin that "the cover is a nice blue, the dust jacket in mourning hue ― appropriately, I feel".

She wrote that "if such 'editing' of this nobly indigenous work was the only way to gain English attention for it, then our very feeble stature as colonial writers is painfully exposed.

She counted as her long time friend Robert Samuel Ross, lamenting his death after an unbroken friendship of 30 years in a letter to the Labor Call.

[38] Baker later agitated for a memorial to Cambridge, and in 1946 a plaque, erected in the foyer of Williamstown Town Hall by the Lindsay Gordon Lover's Society, was unveiled by president of the Bread and Cheese Club, J. K. Moir.

When Baker wrote a series of biographical notes, which she later donated to the National Library of Australia, she included a history of Cambridge's life.

This included an observation that Cambridge's maid was unwilling to leave in order to be married, which literary critic Roy Duncan has obliquely noted seemed "completely unmindful that there may have been other reasons for this than loyalty to a mistress [which revealed] something of [Baker's] own personality".

[41] The Society later commissioned a bronze plaque of Baker by sculptor Wallace Anderson, which was presented to her by Bernard O'Dowd and placed on exhibition in the shop-front of Robertson and Mullens' in Elizabeth Street, Melbourne.

[57] Her funeral service took place at St Peter's Church in East Melbourne and she was cremated at Springvale Botanical Cemetery with Methodist rites.