FIRST there was Sara Henderson, the NT cattle woman who overcame a million dollar debt and put Bullo River Station on the map, writing a best seller autobiography From Strength to Strength in the process.
Then came Henderson's daughter, Marlee Ranacher, with her book Bullo River Station: The Next Generation and now Sheryl McCorry exploits the outback cattle queen genre with Stars Over Shiralee.
- Stars over Shiralee, by Sheryl McCorry. Pan Macmillan, rrp $34.99
But don't expect too much about station life in this, McCorry's second book.
While her first, Diamonds and Dust, covered her years in the Kimberley running million-acre cattle stations, this is more a blow-by-blow account of the awful pit of despair and self-doubt into which she falls when "the wind beneath her wings", Bob McCorry, her husband (20 years her senior) dies and she marries a violent bully.
It's an excruciatingly vivid account of McCorry's painful journey to understanding her own sorrows and grief in the aftermath of the tough old stockman's depression and ultimate death.
Her next marriage takes her from her new home in the southwest of Western Australia, "Shiralee", where she breeds and fattens cattle to Broome.
But her new husband is unpredictably violent and she withdraws, faces cancer and near destruction until finally, she comes to rediscover old strengths and gets her mojo back and lands herself a nice big muscly farmer too.
She's a gutsy woman but even gutsy women are vulnerable when marriages turn sour.
Anyone who has endured a violent marriage will find much comfort in McCorry's honest depiction of her plummet and ultimate salvation.
