Kate Baker emigrated to Victoria with her family as a child and was educated at North Williamstown State High School. She became a teacher in 1881, and in 1886, while teaching at Wanalta Creek near Rushworth, she met Joseph Furphy. Furphy and Baker maintained a correspondence after the former returned to his home in Shepparton, and the friendship, support and faith in Furphy's abilities as a writer which Baker provided has been seen as crucial in sustaining Furphy through the writing of his great novel Such is Life. Baker retired from teaching in 1913, a year after Furphy's death, and devoted herself to gaining recognition for Furphy as a writer. Though she subsisted on a small pension from the Victorian education department, Baker met the expenses to publish or republish several works, including The Poems of Joseph Furphy (1916), Such Is Life (2nd ed., 1917), and Rigby's Romance (1921). Baker considered the the promotion of Furphy's writing as her 'life-work', and she wrote articles, addressed literary societies, and sent copies of Furphy's books to libraries around the world, earning an O.B.E. for her efforts in 1937. Baker also collaborated with Miles Franklin on an eventual biography of Furphy, though there was some tension between Baker and Franklin over the former's zealous attempts to control the interpretation of Furphy's life and works. Furphy's modern biographer John Barnes has observed that Baker's championing of the Furphy cause was based on personal attachment rather than critical appreciation, but it is certain that her efforts played a large part in publicising the work of a man now regarded as one of Australia's great writers.
