later wrote "As we grew to love South Australia, we felt that we were in an expanding society, still feeling the bond to the motherland, but eager to develop a perfect society." Unusually for a woman in those times, Spence learned about production, exchange and wealth in this early developing country, "the value of machinery, of roads and bridges, and of ports for transport and export". With her sisters, Spence opened a school and orphanage. She never married but did state she had refused two offers to wed. Her brother John Brodie Spence went on to become a prominent banker and parliamentarian and her sister Jessie married Andrew Murray Hamdache. Journalism and literature Spence had a talent for writing and an urge to be read, so it was natural that in her teens she became attracted to journalism. Through family connections, she began with short pieces and poetry published in The South Australian. Catherine and her sisters also worked as governesses for some of the leading families in Adelaide, at the rate of sixpence an hour. For several years, Spence was the South Australian correspondent for The Argus newspaper writing under her brother's name until the coming of the telegraph. Spence's first work, before the age of 30, was the novel Clara Morison: A Tale of South Australia During the Gold Fever. It was initially rejected, but her friend John Taylor found a publisher in J. W. Parker and Son, and it was published in 1854. Spence received forty pounds for it, but was charged ten pounds for abridging it to fit in the publisher's standard format. It was given good reviews, and was the first novel written in Australia by a woman. At the same time Spence became employed as a journalist on The Register, but not initially with her own byline. Spence's second novel Tender and True was published in 1856, and to her delight went through a second and third printing, though she never received a penny more than the initial twenty pounds. Then followed her third novel, published in Australia as Uphill Work and in England as Mr Hogarth's Will, published in 1861 and several more though some were unpublished in her lifetime including Gathered In (unpublished until 1977) and Hand fasted (unpublished until 1984). In 1888, she published A Week In the Future, a tour-tract of the utopia she imagined a century in the future