FEATURE
A life working in agriculture took a twist as unexpected as any of the plots devised by prolific author Fleur McDonald AdCertAA’95 since she began to write in 2008.
When truth is
Stranger than fiction Living out of Esperance with her husband and two children, Fleur was focussed on working hard on the farm and raising her children, both with special needs. At the time, she would have thought it a fictional notion that she would one day have sold 650,000 copies of her now 19 books - and counting.
and the storyline just came out of nowhere. I don’t remember much about writing that first book to be honest, except I loved playing around with words and sentences. Life was still overwhelming with the kids and everything else I had to do, but the need to write was overwhelming too.”
“My kids were really difficult - Rochelle, who had been diagnosed with Dyspraxia, didn’t sleep through the night until she went to kindy, and Hayden was diagnosed with a high risk of autism. Neither of them spoke until they were more than five years’ old and life was chock-a-block, working fulltime on the farm, never getting any sleep, teaching them sign language, therapy, screaming kids and never really understanding why, it was a real blur.”
Out of that fog, “Red Dust- an outback novel of love, intrigue and redemption”, Fleur’s first Australian rural crime fiction book was born. “I wrote the first third and submitted it to Allen and Unwin. They bought Red Dust on the first three chapters and offered me a two-book deal. My writing took off from there. I was very much in the right place at the right time. There is so much luck in publishing and there was hunger for this genre of book.”
Somehow in the fog, Fleur managed to read a book by Australian rural fiction author, Rachael Treasure, and it occurred to her that she could write one too.
After growing up around station country at Orroroo, SA, where her parents had a fuel distribution business, Fleur’s father encouraged her to apply to study at Marcus, keen for his daughter to “get a piece of paper”. Completing the one-year course in agribusiness has stood her in good stead during her time on the land and now, running her writing business.
“I’d always had an affinity with writing, I’d been writing ever since I could hold a pen and I had loved to read ever since I was taught. Because of that, I subconsciously knew how to structure a book. So, I started writing. I found solace in words
16
