Sheryl McCorry was the first Australian woman to run an immense cattle station (800,000 ha), and has recently written a memoir/autobiography, Diamonds and Dust, detailing her time on the land, her two difficult marriages and the loss of her young son. Christopher Bantick interviews her in "The Courier-Mail".
She pulls no punches in this at-times brutally frank and astringent book. Did she have to record her life in a fiercely uncompromising way?"When I sat down to write, it all just tumbled out. Everything. My father called me after he had read the book and said you've written as you talk.
"But what I have written was the way it was for me. I'm pleased I have written the book as it has meant a sense of healing. When I wrote about the death of my son, I was angry.
"I rewrote it through tears and finally, the third time, I saw it clearly." While many books are described as Australian, McCorry's is the real deal. She can write with spare brevity and a kind of unadorned honesty that is at times confrontational and also profoundly
moving.
