house in Macquarie Place. By 1828, when she gradually retired from active involvement in commerce, she had acquired extensive property holdings in the city. Like many others, however, she was on occasions somewhat economical with the truth. In March 1820 she had returned to England with her daughters to visit her native village, and came back to Sydney the next year. So in the 1828 census, when asked to describe her condition, she declared that she "came free in 1821". In the emancipist Society of New South Wales, she gained respect for her charitable works and her interest in the church and education. She was appointed one of the Governors of the Free Grammar School in 1825. Reibey built a cottage in the suburb of Hunters Hill, New South Wales circa 1836, where she lived for some time. The cottage, situated on the shores of the Lane Cove River, was later acquired by the Joubert brothers, who enlarged it. It is now known as Fig Tree House and is listed on the (now defunct) Register of the National Estate. On her retirement, she built a house at Newtown, Sydney, where she lived until her death on 30 May 1855 from pneumonia. She was 78 years old. An enterprising and determined person of strong personality, during her lifetime Reibey earned a reputation as an astute and successful business woman in the colony of New South Wales. She is featured on the obverse of Australian twenty-dollar notes printed since 1994. One of Mary and Thomas Reibey's grandchildren, Thomas Reibey (1821-1912), later became the Premier of Tasmania from 1876 to 1877. Novels At least three novels have been written based on her life. The novel Sara Dane by Catherine Gaskin, which has sold over 2 million copies, is only loosely factually accurate. It was made into a television mini-series in 1982, which added romantic entanglements and a second-marriage for the character, Sarah Dane, which did not occur for Mary Reibey . More accurate is the novel Mary Reibey by Kathleen Pullen. A neglected but interesting Australian children's author, Nance Donkin's historical children's novel House By the Water (Angus and Robertson; Sydney, 1970: Penguin; Ringwood, 1973) tells part of Mary Reibey's story, but is no longer in print. Donkin also wrote An Emancipist, illustrated by Jane Robinson (Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1968), a biography of Mary Reibey, written for children. Meg Keneally's novel The