Jeff McGill grew up hearing about his great-great-grandmother from her grandson, Arnold McGill OAM, Jeff’s grandfather. He first fell in love with Kennedy’s story from her 1930 newspaper obituary, which describes her as ‘a noted horsewoman in her younger days and took part in many daring exploits’. It fired his imagination and he could never get her tales of adventure out of his mind.
So, Jeff delved into them with meticulous research to write Kennedy’s life story. Jeff spent decades laying the framework of fact around the oral histories he had been told, and visited the Warrumbungle mountains to ‘walk the ground’ and locate bush graves. Jeff thought Kennedy’s story was worth telling because ‘she was a woman who stood out on a wild frontier mostly dominated by men’, and because her death in
