About

Photo Courtesy of Lisa Baker

A fifth-generation farmer, Margareta 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 home-bound 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 billy-tea to pavements, tall buildings and lattes.

A past winner of a prestigious Victorian Rural Women's Bursary and a Marcus Oldham Rural Leadership Program graduate, Margareta is passionate about farming, rural life and its resilient and wonderful people.

Her first writing success was with a 'Story in 50 Words' where, in her teens, she won a dictionary and thesaurus. These tools of the trade, preciously stored, were to prove invaluable when she finally sat down  twenty or so years later, to pursue a life-long dream of writing a novel.  BELLA'S RUN was the outcome.

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 & rescue admin officer, petrol pump attendant, waitress, radiography typist, station gardener, checkout chick, 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 four-wheel-driving 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.

And... because she's a writer... writes anywhere and everywhere she gets the chance...