Jill Blee
Writer and historian
Latest Release
Champagne at Three
The story of a trans mining engineer
When Rebecca died on August 17, 2017 I promised the extended family who attended her wake I would write her biography because most of them had no idea where she had been and what had happened to her from the time she had stopped being Robert Michael Norton. Her transformation from Robert to Rebecca had been a secret, never talked about at family gatherings.
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She had returned to Ballarat about the same time as I had, penniless and in poor health, addicted to cigarettes and champagne. We spent afternoons in her little apartment yarning about world events and the politicians she admired like Angela Merkel and Vladimer Putin until she became too ill to care for herself. It was the nursing home staff who restricted the champagne to one bottle a day delivered to her room promptly at three every afternoon.
As I set about tracing her life from one mining site to another within Australia and beyond, and discovering the issues she faced before and after she made the decision to undergo gender reassignment surgery, I decided that Champagne at Three was a fitting title for the biography I had written. It was published by Rainshadow an imprint of Clouds of Magellan in 2025.
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"Jill Blee is first and foremost an historian, but one who uses fiction to illuminate the past. "What Brigid does best is to cast light on what the experience of the famine in a small community, Ballyvaghan, meant in emotional terms for those experiencing it. This is a compassionate novel, well-researched, a compelling read if one has an interest in what is quite recent history, a history which threatens to repeat itself in the modern world."
Frances Devlin Glass
Praise & Reviews
“Champagne at Three is a very deeply moving account of flawed but brave and brilliant human being”
Celia Bowman
"This biography of Rob/Rebecca Norton will interest and fascinate readers. It explores in a calm and clearly written style the life path of a talented, gifted mining engineer, the sibling of the author. The book is an important contribution to the literature on trailblazers in sex and gender change."
Amazon Review
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About Jill Blee
Jill Blee began her professional life as a scientist in synthetic fibres before turning to writing, history, and teaching. Her journey into academia started in the suburbs of Sydney, driven by a desire to understand Australia’s past. She earned degrees in history and writing, culminating in a PhD from Federation University. Jill’s work explores the stories of migration, identity, and the often-overlooked voices in Australia’s development.