"Margaret Trist (1914-1986) was born Margaret Beth Lucas in Dalby on 27 November 1914 and educated at a small convent school there. On leaving school she moved to Sydney where, at the age of nineteen, she married Frank Trist. Trist spent most of the remainder of her life in Sydney, apart from a small period in the early years of the war when she and her husband lived in Blaxland in the Blue Mountains. The key to many of the characters of her novels and short stories is often to be found in their rural past and Trist makes frequent use of her own upbringing in Dalby. Her first two collections of short stories, In the Sun (1943) and What Else is There (1946), were appreciated for their 'quiet strength and serenity' but her concentration upon 'ordinary people in ordinary places and situations on the land' was seen as limiting. The recurrent theme in Trist's fiction is a bittersweet experience of local place. The local provides a community that can offer a sense of belonging, particularly to older people, but the familiar codes of accepted behaviour and vocation that come with it tend to stifle those who yearn for a more satisfying life in keeping with the deep instinctive drives and urges of the human psyche. Trist's first novel Now that We're Laughing (1945) is set in the Blue Mountains and uses a romantic triangle to examine the class structure and moral codes of a small provincial community. She continues with "Daddy"(1947). Morning in Queensland (1958) is Trist's last novel and it is considered her best. In it she returns to her own childhood. " (http://www.usq.edu.au/pmrc/literaryhi...) Margaret Trist was born at Dalby and attended St Columba's Convent. She moved to Sydney in 1931 and became very active in the city's literary world. She met her husband, Frank Trist, at a meeting of the Junior Literary Society and they were married in December 1933. During the 1930s, Trist worked as a secretary for several organisations in Sydney and was a script assistant at the ABC for the poet and editor John Thompson. aka Margaret Lucas Trist