author

May Vivienne

1855–1929

An Australian travel writer with a singer’s flair for scene and story, she is best remembered for lively books that carried readers across Western Australia and South Australia in the early 1900s. Her work mixes movement, local detail, and a strong sense of place.

1 Audiobook

Travels in Western Australia being a description of the various cities and towns, goldfields, and agricultural districts of that state

Travels in Western Australia being a description of the various cities and towns, goldfields, and agricultural districts of that state

by May Vivienne

About the author

May Vivienne was the pen name of May Vivian Rayner, an Australian writer remembered for travel books about life, landscape, and settlement in the west and south of the country. Contemporary notices describe her as an opera singer before she turned her energies to writing, and later readers have especially linked her name with the goldfields and long overland journeys.

Her best-known books include Travels in Western Australia and Sunny South Australia. Reviews from the time praised the earlier Western Australian book, and booksellers’ and library records show that her writing focused on describing towns, districts, industries, and the character of the places she visited in a vivid, accessible way.

An obituary published in Adelaide in November 1926 says she died there in her seventieth year and identifies her publicly with the name “May Vivienne.” Some catalog records and later summaries give slightly different birth-and-death years, so exact dating is not perfectly consistent across sources; what is clear is that she was active in the early twentieth century and left behind a distinctive record of Australian travel writing.