Marlee Ranacher: Bullo: The Next Generation

Reviewed by CARROLL DU CHATEAU

Dysfunctional families may be more interesting than ordinary ones, but only rarely are their feuds and fights played out in opposing books. First there was Sara Henderson, the award-winning mother of three small daughters who heroically fought to save the family cattle station, Bullo - half a million square hectares of Australia's Northern Territory laced with with rivers, fords and gullies, thick with red mud or choking dust depending on the season.

The world identified with Henderson. In 1991 she won Australian Business Woman of the Year and was persuaded to write her story. Her autobiographies From Strength to Strength and The Strength in Us All, laced with charming anecdotes of station life and tales of betrayal - mostly by her husband, but later her daughter, Bonnie, too - caught the imagination. Next, her middle daughter, Bonnie, burst into print with Her Father's Daughter.

And now, 11 years after her mother's first book, comes Bullo: The Next Generation, written by Henderson's eldest daughter. Marlee is the daughter who really loved the farm. Unlike her mother, who struggled with the outback and hardly ever left the house section, Marlee was her father's right-hand man. So this book adds the stories that you feel hungry for, after reading Henderson's version. There's the stuff about roping wild bulls, three-day cattle musters, starting at 4am, building corrals, fording flooded rivers, helicopter mustering. Though Ranacher's style is plain, it gets you there, on to that vast outback station with the red dust, insects and hard, hard work.

But it's the human side of Ranacher's story that is so gripping. If you believe her version of events, some time after her husband's death (soon after sailing to America with an all-woman crew) and her subsequent rise to fame in Australia, Henderson turned on her formerly-beloved eldest daughter. While Marlee lost her first husband in a freak motorbike accident, worked, unpaid driving a grader to make new roads so they could flush recalcitrant cattle out of the backblocks of Bullo, then brought her second husband, Franz, to the station where he too, worked his guts out, her mother became increasingly difficult. She reneged on a verbal agreement to pass the station to Marlee, and instead entered into secret negotiations with her other children who had long been living far from Bullo.

The last part of the book is thick with the court battles and negotiations between Ranacher and her mother - ending in March 2001, when Henderson agreed to allow her to buy Bullo. The price: $3 million worth of debt in legal fees, loans and money owed to her mother.

I stress that this is one side of a three-sided story, and as a piece of writing, Bullo: The Next Generation lacks Henderson's sparkle. What it does have is a feeling of authenticity and drama to the last, hasty page - as though once Ranacher had won her battle to get the 1700 sq kilometres of Aussie outback dirt she had worked so long and hard for, she couldn't wait to get back to Bullo and work off that debt.

Random House, $49.95