Senior School students were recently treated to a visit from Old Girl and author Nicole Alexander (1983). A fourth generation grazier, Nicole’s early education was via The Correspondence School. She and her siblings received their weekly school lessons through the mail and their mother taught them around the dining room table. After a couple of years at a local primary school, Nicole spent six years at Abbotsleigh as a boarder before completing a Bachelor of Arts through the University of New England and taking up a marketing career in Singapore and Australia.

 

In the late 1990s, she returned to the family’s wheat and cattle station in Moree, in northern NSW, to regroup for 12 months and never left! Nicole spoke to the students of her path from Abbotsleigh, which eventually led her back to the land she loves. Not only is she a working partner and business manager of the family property, but she is also a talented writer and somehow manages to successfully combine these two disparate passions.

 

Her poetry, travel and genealogy articles have been published in Australia, America and Singapore and she is a regular contributor to New England Country Living Magazine. Her two most recently published novels, The Bark Cutters (2010) and A Changing Land (2011) follow four generations of a pioneering family carving a place for themselves in the Australian bush. She hopes that those who read her novels will have a greater understanding of the emotional attachment generational graziers feel towards their properties as she herself lives and works on the land in which her forebears are buried.

 

Before leaving, Nicole presented Headmistress Judith Poole with copies of both her novels for the Abbotsleigh library. She has begun work on her third novel in the saga and we look forward to adding that to the collection.