AS a fifth generation farmer Margareta Osborn has a great love of the land.
Subscribe now for unlimited access.
$0/
(min cost $0)
or signup to continue reading
It is the Australian bush and its characters that have inspired her latest novel, Rose River.
Margareta will be coming to the Griffith Library on Friday, March 6 to speak about her novel and sign copies.
She grew up on her family's historic dairy farm in Gippsland, Victoria, the middle child of three. She completed her HSC and left Gippsland for the bright lights of Melbourne only to jump on a homebound country train three months later muttering, 'You can take the girl from the country, but not the country from this girl.'
She didn't return to the city, preferring paddocks, mountains and billytea to pavements, tall buildings and lattes.
She is a past winner of a prestigious Victorian Rural Women's Bursary and a Marcus Oldham Rural Leadership Program graduate and is passionate about farming, rural life and its resilient and wonderful people.
Holding a Diploma in Conservation and Land Management, with years of experience in Landcare and agricultural extension, Margareta dismally failed governmental report writing as every screed she wrote read like a chapter book.
Now a full-time farmer and author, over the years she has also worked as, among other things, a farmhand, station cook, governess, farm manager, fire and rescue admin officer, petrol pump attendant, waitress, radiography typist, station gardener, checkout operator, bank officer, vegetable grower and milked the odd cow or two - none of which taught her how to write but gave her plenty of ideas on what to write about.
In her spare time, Margareta writes a regular page for the Gippsland Country Life magazine, is an active volunteer firefighter, cooks cakes, reads books, adores water and snow skiing, rides motorbikes and occasionally a horse, loves fourwheeldriving into the remotest places she and her family can find, sometimes arranges flowers and sporadically makes a quilt.
She would also like to learn how to grow good lucerne hay, mark her own calves and walk in killer high heels.
Margareta lives with her husband and three children on a property in rural Victoria. She is the author of four bestselling novels, Bella's Run, Hope's Road, Mountain Ash, Rose River and the bestselling ebook A Bush Christmas. She will be giving a lunch time talk at the library starting at 1pm on March 6.
The event is free and there is a light lunch provided.
Rose River
The novel is adapted from Margareta’s bestselling ebook novella A Bush Christmas, Rose River is a gloriously funny romantic comedy set in the beautiful Australian outback.
