2024 | Kate Fullagar
Kate Fullagar (ACT) was announced as the winner of the 2024 Hazel Rowley Literary Fellowship at the Wheeler Centre on 13 March 2024. The announcement followed a discussion between Adolfo Aranjuez and Mandy Sayer, our 2021 Fellow, about her biography Those Dashing McDonagh Sisters: Australia’s first female filmmaking team.
Kate is writing a biography of Marguerite Wolters, a Dutch woman who was a spy mistress to empires and revolutionists in the 18th century. Marguerite Wolter’s intelligence to the British contributed significantly to their decision in 1786 to build a penal colony in NSW. Kate was intrigued when she came across Marguerite Wolters while researching her biography of Bennelong and Phillip. This inspired her to find out more and write about this mysterious and unusual woman who was so influential in British colonial history.
Kate is a social and cultural historian. Her most recent book is Bennelong & Phillip: A History Unravelled (Simon & Schuster, 2023). Her previous book, The Warrior, the Voyager, and the Artist: Three Lives in an Age of Empire (Yale, 2020), won the 2021 Douglas Stewart Literary Prize for Non-Fiction and the 2020 NSW Premier’s General History Prize.
(Photo: Ellen Dahl)
