In 1969 she was a fellow in creative arts at Australian National University, Canberra. She settled permanently to her native country in 1974 and received the Patrick White award in the same year. Stead died in Sydney on March 31, 1983. It was pieced together by R.G. Geering, who also wrote her biography. Stead set the bitter story on the east coast of the United States.
Stead sees the family as a symbol for the world, ruled by power politics.
As in her other novels, Stead also dealt with the theme of a woman facing the conflict between her own artistic freedom and family ties. Loved Children was poorly received when it was published, and went unrecognized for 25 years. It was reissued in 1965 with an influential preface by the American poet Randall Jarrell, finally attracting much attention. One reads the book, with an almost ecstatic pulse of recognition. Stead was fully aware of socialist-realist theory of literature, but never adopted its Soviet formula.