Mina: Australia's first female cookbook author

The confident authority with which Mina Rawson wrote on domestic matters was drawn directly from lived experience. While her works are peppered with autobiographical fragments that offer glimpses into how she acquired her knowledge, her tone remains pragmatic and unsentimental. She writes with clear authority, but never with pretension. Her advice is offered plainly and directly, often with a dry wit. 

Mina’s first cookbook was published in 1878, titled Mrs. Lance Rawson’s Cookery Book and Household Hints. Mina credits necessity as the mother of invention, claiming many of the included recipes as her own and all to have been tried and tested by her. In the preface, the then 27-year-old Mina concedes: 

Years later at the age of 43, Mina published The Australian enquiry book of household and general information (1894), which urged readers to “refer to me for everything”. The publisher’s preface declares Mina to be a “a lady of wide Australian experience in town and bush” with the object of “helping people to help themselves”.  As with her first publication, the publisher promises all subject matter was tried and tested by Mina, with much of the material being original. 

Mina was born on King Street in Sydney, on 10 October 1851. Both Mina’s parents, Elizabeth Harriet and James Cahill, had migrated to Australia from England and Ireland respectively. Her father was a solicitor, and the family lived a comfortable life in Sydney until he passed away in 1857. A few years later, Mina’s mother married Dr James Cadell, who resided on a property near Tamworth in New South Wales. It was here that Mina adopted bushcraft skills and sense of independence that would furnish her success as a regional homemaker later in life. 

As Mina tells it: 

“When I was barely twelve years of age, my mother took it into her head to marry a man with eleven children. I, being an only and much adored child up to that time, found her ideas of pioneering more tragical than comforting, and as she added four more to the family it is hardly to be wondered that I am somewhat resourceful.” 

 Making the Best of It, 10 April 1920

Even though Mina was from a genteel, middle-class background, being Australian-born and so deeply familiar with bush life made her something of an outsider in this tightly knit, English-educated circle. Her sisters-in-law had each arrived with the trappings of a more formal upbringing, and their lives at The Hollow were supported by family resources, leisure, and status. 

Mina, by contrast, had grown up adapting to the realities of colonial life. Her brand of resilience and resourcefulness, while admirable, may not have aligned with the social expectations or domestic ideals held by the women around her. 

Mina later reflected on this quiet divide in her memoirs:  

“Those were pioneering days no doubt, but there were many women who had far harder times than ever I had. I am an Australian, and in a way was born to the conditions and surroundings of the bush.” 

Making the Best of It, The Queenslander, 10 April 1920

Unlike her sisters-in-law, Mina’s married life was marked by financial uncertainty and constant adaptation. 

After leaving The Hollow, she and Lance tried their luck with a sugar plantation at Kircubbin near Maryborough, and later, a fishing station at Boonooroo in the Wide Bay region. Both ventures failed, often due to limited capital, poor infrastructure, or sheer bad timing. 

According to Mina,  

“there was really very little to be made on the place, nothing in fact without more capital than we possessed. I believe there was a fortune in fishing there, but only if done in a big way with the most up-to-date methods, such as refrigerating machinery, properly constructed smoke sheds, quick launches and good boats or trawlers”.

Making the Best of It, The Queenslander, 1 May 1920

“When I look back to that time I could almost cry at our childish want of practical knowledge...

If we had not been young our hearts would have broken with the repeated disappointments of the place. The only reason we remained was because we were almost self-supporting, and I was able to earn enough to keep us in the necessaires we did not produce. It was simply our sense of humour which kept us from dying too. It was most fortunate that I could earn, otherwise I don’t know what we would have done.”

Making The Best of It, The Queenslander, 20 March 1920

Mina recalled baking their first loaves of bread at Boonooroo in a kerosene tin surrounded by a fire pit made of bricks and sand. To supplement the household income, she wrote articles, cooked, taught, and ran a small poultry enterprise. Her stories appeared in Queensland newspapers, and her cookbooks found a steady readership. 

According to Mina:

"There used to be hundreds of things done in the bush in those days by both men and women whose inventive faculties only came to light through absolute necessity. I was by no means an exception; hundreds of women were just as clever as I was, though my pen was possibly an unusual gift."

Making The Best of It, The Queenslander, 3 April 1920

Mina’s early lessons in resilience and resourcefulness became the cornerstone of her authority as a writer. What began as the practical work of survival evolved into a lifelong passion for sharing knowledge and experience. 

Writing became not only a source of income but also a form of self-expression and influence. As her life unfolded, so too did her literary ambition, expanding from the domestic sphere to reach readers seeking advice on “everything and for everybody.” 

A by-line for Mina’s Australian Enquiry Book of Household and General Information (1894) promised “information upon everything and for everybody.” It was an apt description of both the book and its author. Mina’s advice ranged from preserving eggs and treating snakebites to writing business letters and managing a household. While her work was grounded in the domestic sphere, her curiosity and confidence extended far beyond it. 

Mina understood her audience and aimed to make her advice accessible. She minimized the ingredients in her recipes and priced her book lower than English staples like Mrs Beeton or Mrs Warne. 

Writing at a time when Australian literature was developing a distinct national voice, she engaged with the same cultural moment as Henry Lawson, Miles Franklin, Banjo Paterson, and Barbara Baynton, who explored the struggle and spirit of the bush. While women writers were less visible in these circles, many, including Mina, explored these themes through domestic writing and, when possible, through fiction and poetry. 

In the early 1890s, Mina’s short stories appeared in anthologies presenting colonial Australia to readers abroad. 

Her tragic story, Jack Hanmer’s Sad Story, was included in Under the Gum Tree: Australian 'Bush' Stories (1890), while her romantic tale The Bushman’s Rest featured in Coo-ee: Tales of Australian Life (1891). 

Mina’s stories, like many in these volumes, combine freedom and danger, capturing the contradictions of colonial existence.

Coo-ee, dedicated “to English women in the old home, from their sisters in the new,” and Under the Gum Tree, which featured work of 'native-born Australians', both reflected both a desire to share these colonial experiences and broader fascinations on the adventure and uncertainty of life in the bush. 

Cookbooks and household guides became valuable records of social history, revealing what people ate, valued, and how they adapted to their environment. Publishing such works was no small feat in a market still dominated by British imports. Mina’s success in getting her works into print reflects both the growing nationalism of the period, a cultural push toward self-sufficiency, and her determined, resourceful character.  

Her writing remains one of the earliest and clearest examples of how domestic knowledge and cultural identity intersected in colonial Australia. It was “information upon everything” but more importantly, it was for everybody who called the colonies home. 

While Mina’s domestic advice was pragmatic, her reflections on colonial life were often layered. She did not shy away from describing physical, emotional and mental hardship, but she also wrote with affection and pride about the bush lifestyle. 

In her memoirs, she wrote: 

There’s no doubt the old pioneers had the best of it as regards life, and its interests and excitements, for there was plenty of life that most men love, plenty of adventure that appeals to the manly, out-of-door men. They formed their stations, endured hardships and privation, fought droughts, bush fires, and floods.”

Making The Best of It, The Queenslander, 12 June 1920

Like many contemporaries, Mina adopted both the romantic nostalgia and the harsh realities of the bush. Her short stories and poetry reveal a writer who was pragmatic yet idealistic, who was realistic about the difficulties of colonial life, yet deeply invested in its possibilities and her own role within it. 

Mina Rawson was very much a product of her time. Her achievements, ingenuity, and authority were shaped by the opportunities and limitations of 19th-century colonial Queensland, just as her attitudes were framed by its racial hierarchies. 

She relied on the labour and expertise of Aboriginal people and Australian South Sea Islanders, acknowledging their skills even as she viewed them through the lens of colonial paternalism.  

Her writings reveal both admiration and prejudice, practicality and idealism, offering a perspective that is candid, deeply informed, and unmistakably situated within the values of her era. 

Throughout the 19th century, British settlers, especially those living beyond the main towns like Mina, used native ingredients out of both necessity and curiosity. Mina's cookbooks include recipes featuring native game such as wallaby, goanna, ibis, bush turkey and kangaroo.  

Transforming these local foods into familiar British-style dishes became part of the broader process of colonising Australia, adapting and asserting  European ideals in the name of 'civilisation'.

As a narrator of her own life, Mina is reliable in recounting her experiences and the challenges she overcame but offer points of reflection on the complexities of race relations in colonial Queensland. 

Her writing reveals the complexities of race relations in colonial Queensland. On remote stations, she relied heavily on Aboriginal people and Australian South Sea Islanders, who taught her how to find food, use native plants, and survive in the bush. While she acknowledged their skills, her work also reflects the racial hierarchies and prejudices of the time. 

In her cookbooks and journals, she blended curiosity and respect with the language of colonial superiority, remarking that “whatever the blacks eat, the whites may safely try.” She also recognised the loss of traditional knowledge as Aboriginal people were displaced, highlighting her awareness of the dispossession unfolding even as she benefited from it. 

This tension, between remarkable capability and historically conditioned prejudice, makes her memoirs, cookbooks, and columns invaluable for understanding both individual agency and the social structures of colonial Australia. 

Much of Mina’s work was published between the 1870s and 1890s, with her serialised memoirs Making the Best of It appearing in The Queenslander during the 1920s. By then, Mina felt that: 

“Today there are very few parts of the country where one has any very real hardships, and, as a matter of fact, the hardships we had at Bonoro were generally obviated and got over. We found ways, many of them quite original ways too”.

Making The Best of It, The Queenslander, 3 April 1920

Looking back, she truly lived an extraordinary life. She doctored livestock, built cottages, taught swimming—believing herself the first woman swim teacher in Central Queensland—and published fiction, advice columns, and even briefly edited a newspaper. 

Reflecting on her life, Mina said: 

It is a good thing that the future is hidden from us, otherwise many of us would not live to go through it. At the same time life is made up of shadow and shine, and as much of one as the other I think... Personally I have had as much shine as shadow, and as one gets old one lives on and in one’s memories.”

Making The Best of It, The Queenslander, 10 July 1920

Mina Rawson’s life and work stand as a testament to the resourcefulness, ambition, and complexities of a colonial woman navigating a world of both possibility and limitation. Her writings remain enduring records of Australian domestic life, cultural identity, and the contradictions inherent in the frontier experience.  

Mina's story is now featured in the exhibition Extraordinary Stories on Level 4 at State Library Queensland.  

Some works by Mina 

Mrs Lance Rawson’s cookery book and household hints, 1890  

The Australian enquiry book of household and general information, 1894 

The antipodean cookery book and kitchen companion, 1895 

Jack Hanmer’s Sad Story in the anthology Under the Gum Tree : Australian Bush Stories in 1890. This tragic tale tells the story of Jack Hanmer, a rich settler who leaves his beloved wife at their bush home to go into town, only to return and find her dead from a snakebite. 

The Bushman’s Rest was published in the anthology Coo-ee : Tales of Australian Life in 1891. It uses the location of a public house out in the bush (The Bushman’s rest) as a setting for a romance that saves a pretty, young woman from the dangers of remote life. 

The Fulfilment of a Dream: A True Tale of the Queensland Bush which was published in the North Queensland Herald across two instalments in February 1894, telling the story of a squatter who suffers a fatal accident on his way to meet his English sweetheart. 

The English Governess, a station romance between a rich and noble Englishman called Charley, and a pretty, honest, young Australian woman called Annie. It was serialised in two instalments in the Australian Journal, December 1895.  

Scholarship on Mina and the history of food in Queensland 

More Than Just Recipes : Reading Colonial Life in the Works of Wilhelmina Rawson, 2013, Blake Singley in Cookbooks : Writing, Reading and Publishing Culinary Literature in Australasia no. 24 

biting the hand that feeds: Australian cuisine and Aboriginal sovereignty in the Great Sandy Strait, 2016, Shannon Woodcock in Feminist Review, Vol. 114 

Wild Food: Colonialism and the Construction of Australian Cuisine. Cookbooks, Cultivation and the Taste of Home, 2024, Michaela Petruso in Culture and History no. 02 

More from our collections 

2967, Rawson Family archive, John Oxley Library, State Library of Queensland. 

9936; Rawson Family Correspondence; John Oxley Library, State Library of Queensland. 

TR 1814, Rawson Family papers, John Oxley Library, State Library of Queensland. 

27637, Winifred Rawson papers, John Oxley Library, State Library of Queensland. 

Money and recipes, or, Reliable remarks re the Hollow lands : first subdivision / by Mrs Lance Rawson. 1891 

The Rawson family – blog post by Marg Powell