My Brilliant Career: Chapter 1 Summary & Analysis

In late 19th-century Australia, three-year-old Sybylla Melvyn wines in pain. Her father chastises her and calms her down. This is Sybylla’s earliest memory. It’s a summer afternoon, and her father has brought her in a little brown pillow out to the run (an open stretch of land) to deposit salt. The salt-shed “peep[s] out picturesquely” from the surrounding shrubs, where Sybylla and her father enjoy lunch. After lunch, they prepare to head home. Her father muzzles the dogs and Sybylla picks flowers until she disturbs a snake. Alarmed, Sybylla cries out, and her father drives away the snake with a stock-whip. In the commotion, he drops his pipe. Young Sybylla picks it up, and the embers burn her fingers. This burn, the narrating Sybylla supposes, is why she remembers the incident so vividly, since her father took her on many such outings but this is the only one she recalls.

Sybylla’s father, Richard Melvyn, is a “swell” who inherited 200,000 acres from his grandfather. Her mother, Mrs. Melvyn, is “a full-fledged aristocrat.” Mr. Melvyn is known for being hospitable and kind, so the family home, Bruggabrong, is frequently full of guests. Since Bruggabrong is so remote, the house is rarely visited by women, so Sybylla does not know many other women besides her mother.

Sybylla is “both the terror and the amusement” of her family’s guests. She picks up gossip and slang from the adults around her and often poses precocious, inappropriate questions that make visitors blush. She shows no more respect for a land surveyor or clergyman than a laborer, because she refuses to venerate a person simply because of their social status. If the Prince of Wales himself visited, Sybylla would only respect him if he had a personality worth respecting.

At a young age, Sybylla gets her first horse, and by the time she is eight years old she is a gifted rider. Mrs. Melvyn is worried Sybylla is too masculine, but Mr. Melvyn insists that Sybylla should have fun before she has to adhere to the conventional rules of womanhood. Her mother relents, noting that Sybylla should have been a boy. Sybylla continues to ride, ignoring all injuries and feeling no fear. She runs with dogs, climbs trees, drives bullocks, and goes with her father to swim in the stream. Mrs. Melvyn worries for Sybylla’s future, but Mr. Melvyn does not treat his daughter as anything but normal. He is Sybylla’s “hero, confidant, encyclopedia, mate, and even [her] religion” until she is 10 years old. After she turns 10, Sybylla rejects religion altogether.