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Marie Therese "Terry" Underwood OAM (born 19 December 1944) is a best-selling Australian author who lived on a remote cattle station in the Northern Territory of Australia. [1]
Underwood was born as Marie Therese Augustus in Albury, New South Wales in 1944. [2] She was "enchanted by the magic of words and the power of the pen" from a young age. As a child she wrote about swagmen and gypsies, saying "I loved writing and some of my poems and short stories". Some of her early work was published in The Catholic Weekly.
Her first introduction to the outback was via her favourite poems, Banjo Paterson's The Man From Snowy River and Henry Lawson's Outback. Through their words, she imagined a place that was evocative, mysterious and compelling. She dreamed of one day living in such a place, “marrying a farmer and penning her own autobiography.” But Underwood's love affair with the outback was cut short when, at the age of eleven, her family moved to Sydney. [3]
In 1963, at St Vincent's Hospital in Sydney, Underwood nursed her future husband, then who had been admitted with a back injury. [4] “Some say he broke his back to meet me.” [5] [6]
A long-distance courtship by correspondence followed after which the couple were married and set out to start their new life in the outback. "We celebrated our engagement at the Kimberley Hotel, Halls Creek, and were married in Sydney. Then in a red Bedford truck loaded with six tea chests of wedding presents, we drove for days and days to live in a bough shed on the banks of a dry creek bed." Underwood's early fascination with the outback and her childhood dream to marry a farmer had been realised. She was now "a new bride in the middle of nowhere." [3]
In 1968, Underwood and her new husband John moved to Riveren, a cattle station in the Victoria River District in the North-west of the Northern Territory. Their home consisted of “a caravan, a bough shed, camp stove and a tent as the master bedroom”. [1]
In her memoir, Underwood celebrates the close connection she felt with the landscape and station life stating “Riveren has captured our bodies, hearts and spirits. It lies within the heart of Australia. How privileged we are to call it home. Riveren is where I belong. I know it would not have worked anywhere else with anyone else. The middle of nowhere has become my everywhere.” [5] Underwood saw many changes in agricultural practice during her four decades at Riveren.
Riveren was subdivided from the Inverway pastoral lease in 1978. In 1988, Bunda Station was subdivided from the western portion of Inverway. In 2007 John Terry and family purchased Inverway back, [7] but eventually sold both stations to an Indonesian company in 2013. [8]
Underwood was named Business Owner in Northern Territory Telstra Business Women's Owner Awards in 1998, Territorian of the Year for the Katherine Region in 1999 and the Chief Minister's Women's Achievement Award in 1999. She then received a Medal of the Order of Australia in 2005. [1]
The Outback is a remote, vast, sparsely populated area of Australia. The Outback is more remote than the bush. While often envisaged as being arid, the Outback regions extend from the northern to southern Australian coastlines and encompass a number of climatic zones, including tropical and monsoonal climates in northern areas, arid areas in the "red centre" and semi-arid and temperate climates in southerly regions.
Jedda, released in the UK as Jedda the Uncivilized, is a 1955 Australian film written, produced and directed by Charles Chauvel. His last film, it is notable for being the first to star two Aboriginal actors, Robert Tudawali and Ngarla Kunoth in the leading roles. It was also the first Australian feature film to be shot in colour.
In Australia, a station is a large landholding used for producing livestock, predominantly cattle or sheep, that needs an extensive range of grazing land. The owner of a station is called a pastoralist or a grazier, corresponding to the North American term "rancher".
Rodney William Ansell was an Australian cattle grazier and a buffalo hunter. Described to be from "the bush", Ansell became famous in 1977 after he was stranded in extremely remote country in the Northern Territory, and the story of his survival for 56 days with limited supplies became news headlines around the world. Consequently, he served as the inspiration for Paul Hogan's character in the 1986 film Crocodile Dundee. In 1999, he was killed in a shootout by policemen of the Northern Territory Police.
Sara Jane Henderson was an Australian pastoralist and author who became an Australia household name after the publication of her autobiography From Strength to Strength in 1993 about rebuilding Bullo River cattle station in the Northern Territory of Australia.
Peter Falconio was a British tourist who disappeared in a remote part of the Stuart Highway near Barrow Creek in the Northern Territory of Australia on the evening of 14 July 2001, while travelling with his girlfriend Joanne Lees.
In Australia and New Zealand, a cattle station is a large farm, the main activity of which is the rearing of cattle. The owner of a cattle station is called a grazier. The largest cattle station in the world is Anna Creek Station in South Australia, which covers an area of 23,677 square kilometres.
Australia is a 2008 epic adventure drama film directed by Baz Luhrmann and starring Nicole Kidman and Hugh Jackman. The screenplay was written by Luhrmann and screenwriter Stuart Beattie, with Ronald Harwood and Richard Flanagan. The film is a character story, set between 1939 and 1942 against a dramatised backdrop of events across northern Australia at the time, such as the bombing of Darwin during World War II.
We of the Never Never is an autobiographical novel by Jeannie Gunn first published in 1908. Although published as a novel, it is an account of the author's experiences in 1902 at Elsey Station near Mataranka, Northern Territory in which she changed the names of people to obscure their identities. She published the book under the name Mrs Aeneas Gunn, using her husband's first and last name. Over the years, newspapers and magazine articles chronicled the fortunes of the Elsey characters. Jeannie outlived all but Bett-Bett.
Wave Hill Station, most commonly referred to as Wave Hill, is a pastoral lease in the Northern Territory operating as a cattle station. The property is best known as the scene of the Wave Hill walk-off, a strike by Indigenous Australian workers for better pay and conditions, which in turn was an important influence on Aboriginal land rights in Australia.
Riveren Station is a pastoral lease that operates as a cattle station in the Northern Territory of Australia.
Bunda Station is a pastoral lease that operates as a cattle station in the Northern Territory of Australia.
Charles William Tapp best known as Bill Tapp was a pioneer and cattleman from Killarney Station in the Northern Territory of Australia.
Molly Clark was a pastoral and tourism pioneer from Central Australia in the Northern Territory of Australia. She established the National Pioneer Women's Hall of Fame
Alec Donald Ross OAM was an Australian tour guide, member of the stolen generation and custodian of the story of the Alice Springs Telegraph Station in the Northern Territory of Australia.
Sweet Country is a 2017 Australian drama film, directed by Warwick Thornton. Set in 1929 in the sparsely populated outback of the Northern Territory and based on a series of true events, it tells a harsh story against the backdrop of a divided society in the interwar period in Australia.
Marlee Ranacher is an Australian author.
Buchanan is a locality in the Northern Territory of Australia located in the territory's west adjoining the border with the state of Western Australia about 612 kilometres (380 mi) south of the territory capital of Darwin and about 473 kilometres (294 mi) south-west of the municipal seat in Katherine.
Therese Ryder is an Eastern Arrernte artist from Ltyentye Apurte Community, 82 km south east of Alice Springs. Ryder, part of the Iltja Ntjarra Many Hands Art Centre, is primarily a landscape artist and paints her traditional lands in the Central Desert. Ryder is also a linguist who significantly contributed to the "Central and Eastern Arrernte Dictionary" (1994) and also authored a book "Ayeye thipe-akerte: Arrernte stories about birds" (2017).
Pearl Ruth Powell, née Price, formerly Bird, was an Australian memoirist. She was the co-writer of By Packhorse and Buggy (1996) alongside her daughter Eileen McRae. This memoir follows her life where she grew up at the Alice Springs Telegraph Station, the daughter of postmaster Fred Price and, following his early death life on various cattle stations throughout Central Australia.
