From Strength to Strength by Sara Henderson

Sara Henderson is a Gina Rhinehart-esque character from the 1980s, with a pretty truly amazing story that is still hugely problematic. She's from a well-to-do family from Sydney, and in the 1950s meets and marries an American army officer and investment banker, quite a bit older than her. He takes her off to Hong Kong and they have ever so many hilarious, racist japes while they sail around Hong Kong Harbour and he's obviously rooting every woman around them. Then one day, he says they're moving back to Australia because he's bought a million-acre beef cattle station in the Northern Territory from which they will make their millions. There's no road, there's no farmhouse, no water, no amenities at all. He's hired one or two people to work for them and they all live in a wall-less tin shed for several years trying to get the concern off the ground. He's still rooting around, despite the lack of roads out. Things get better, and then worse. Drought, mustering, illness, injury, three daughters, it does all sound very hard. Then he dies, and not only is the farm struggling, but he's also transferred the whole company to her name, and it's about a million dollars in debt, which she didn't know. Because this is an Australian story about money and the land, there's one daughter who sues her mother and is lost to her forever. Apparently the dad made some promises to her, and when he didn't pay up, she sued the compmay, which was all in her mother's name. However, triumph! Plucky Sara and her remaining two daughters turn things around, work very, very hard in a physical capacity that I cannot imagine, and save the farm! Hurrah! In 1991, Sara Henderson was awarded Australian Businesswoman of the Year. Good for her.

Problems: where did that million-acre farm come from? Not once does she mention any Aboriginal ownership or presence on the land, except for a couple of her staff who are portrayed as being stupid and/or drunk. It's just totally absent and such a necessary thing to mentione. Sara also says that her experience was the "most demanding, humiliating and challenging obstacle course any human could be expected to endure." Because I don't want to discount any woman's experience, I am not going to tell her that it was not unbelievably demanding, enormously humiliating, and extremely challenging. However, I feel like she's not in a position to describe it as "the most". I mean, it surely was hard, but moreso than being a refugee, a beaten wife, or even an Aboriginal woman in the Northern Territory in the 1970s? Sara Henderson died from breast cancer in 2005, sadly, having been a high profile advocate for Breast Screen Australia since her wayward in 1991. By this stage she had also having fallen out with all of her daughters. The farm was apparently wound up in 2011, following the ban on the live export cattle trade.