Fleur McDonald: Esperance farmer, turned bestselling rural fiction author, turns to crime in The Prospect

West Australian

17-05-2025

About an hour out of Esperance, there is a slice of country that has curled its roots deep in Fleur McDonald's soul.
Unlike the sandy plains that surround it, the 950ha property is steeped in the heavy clay of the Thomas River. It grows stands of clover ankle deep, where McDonald, still a farmer at heart, loves to watch her lambs graze. There's mallee bushland, giving way to granite outcrops where wild orchids grow. When she looks up from her work in the shearing shed, she can see Cape Arid.
It is in this place that McDonald took the first small, tentative steps towards becoming what she is today: a bestselling author. It's the place where she started farming in WA more than 20 years ago, with her now ex-husband, in a hut with no water or electricity for seven years. It's the place she raised two children. It's the place to which she returns when, despite her new career, she needs a fix of her first love — farming.
Writing has been McDonald's full-time job for more than 15 years, ever since she signed with Allen & Unwin after submitting to its open pitch Friday; her first book, Red Dust, became the highest seller by a debut author in 2009. Since then, she's sold more than 850,000 copies of 24 titles under her very successful brand of rural fiction, mixing suspense, romance and strong female characters.
But then last year, McDonald decided to roll the dice, potentially risking everything she'd built. She signed with a new publisher, HarperCollins, and wrote her first straight crime novel, The Prospect, set in Kalgoorlie.
'I was very aware that this change could actually end my career and I was prepared for that,' McDonald says. 'I turned 50 last year and I just thought, there's not as much time left as there was, you know? I really wanted to have a go. It is a risk, though; people might not think that I've got what it takes in the crime genre but I'm hoping that they do.'
When she speaks to STM, McDonald is two days into a five-day local book tour, before she heads to Queensland and South Australia. So far, the feedback had been positive but she admits to waiting with bated breath for early sales figures.
It turns out she needn't have worried; The Prospect, which follows reporter Zara Ellison and her partner, policeman Jack Higgins, as they investigate a mysterious accident, sold more than 12,000 copies in the first month and spent three weeks at number one in Australian fiction.
And despite her trepidation, McDonald was never tempted to just continue writing what she knew would work; namely, the popular Detective Dave Burrows character, who features in 22 of her books.
'The thing about having a character around for as long as I had Detective Burrows around for, is that I could write him in my sleep,' she says. 'I think that tends to make you a little lazy and I wanted to still create really great reads for people.'
Besides, McDonald is not one to shy away from a challenge. The girl from Orroroo in South Australia's arid Flinders Ranges moved to the Great Southern in WA aged just 19 to work as a farmhand; she remembers being completely taken aback by the rain ('I think my first purchase with my pay was a pair of rubber boots').
After she and her former husband moved to that first farm, with its donga-like hut, her daughter, Rochelle, and son, Hayden, were born 13 months apart. Rochelle, now 25, has dyspraxia which affected her speech, and Hayden was diagnosed with autism; McDonald used Makaton sign language to communicate with them.
It was in trying to help Hayden, now 24 and a trailblazing pilot who has just moved interstate for work, that McDonald rediscovered her childhood love of writing. She'd put it aside with the busyness of life, but when Hayden was struggling with concentration, McDonald decided to start writing kids' books to help keep his attention.
'I wrote about things that he knew; the working dogs, the sheep yards, the sheep, the pet lambs and and so forth, which was really helpful for him,' she remembers. 'Then I read Rachael Treasure's book Jillaroo and I thought, 'Oh, there's obviously a market for this' and I thought I was in pretty good position to write something.'
Her first attempt at pitching Red Dust to Allen & Unwin elicited a rejection; her writing was strong and commercial, they said, but not what they were looking for. Undeterred, McDonald waited three months and tried again. About two weeks later, she had a two-book contract.
Red Dust 'sold a whole heap more than we ever expected … and now here we are 25 books later,' she laughs.
If that makes it sound easy, it wasn't. McDonald's then-husband did not support her writing, she was working on the farm and looking after two children with disabilities, plus taking care of her mother-in-law, who was terminally ill. She worked on her books in secret, right up until the end of her marriage in 2014.
'I didn't think I had any transferable skills; when you leave a relationship like that, it doesn't matter what success you've had, your self-confidence is absolutely shattered,' McDonald says.
But slowly, she built herself back up, devoting more time to writing and, when the kids finished school, going on tour to promote her books.
McDonald spends a lot of time on the road, including driving between Esperance and a second farm she's bought in recent years north of Perth, but also on the lookout for settings for future books. Ideas for narratives can come from anywhere — a segment on the radio, a newspaper headline, a conversation — but evoking an authentic sense of place is all-important.
For The Prospect, McDonald spent time in the Goldfields, 'wandering around and looking and observing and absorbing'.
'I thought Kalgoorlie was a great place to set a book; there's so much history and so much secrecy,' she says. 'Not only does it have mining but it has the east-west trucks, coming across the Nullarbor, there's farming, there's station country, there's Crown land. It's a very rich environment to be able to set stories in.
'I've never written about a place I haven't been because I always want to be able to write authentically … I think that helps with the tension on the page.'
When it occurred to her that there is a more efficient way to cover all those kilometres, she decided to learn how to fly a plane; her father used to fly to reach customers of the family's fuel distribution company, which covered about a quarter of the country.
'I'd never given too much thought to becoming a pilot myself but then I realised, I spent 10 years telling women that they could really do anything they wanted to, just as long as they worked at it,' McDonald says. 'I suddenly thought, 'well, you should probably take a little bit of your own advice'.'
But when she is home, she can balance her two lives — farming and writing. She co-farms the Esperance property, so she can simply dip in and out when needed for seeding or harvest, or when she feels a need to reconnect with that part of herself. She's been known to edit chapters while driving a chaser bin and work on rewrites while following the dogs around as they shift sheep.
'Farming was my first love but I do believe writing is what I am supposed to do, because if I go a couple of days and I haven't written my fingers get really itchy and I get a bit jittery,' she says, 'so it's a bit of a mix for both.'
With a book tour, plus edits on her next novel, out in November and another draft due on June 1 for publication in April, McDonald says her life is 'all a bit mixed up and chaotic, but I really like my world like that'.
'There's no time for writer's block or any of that,' she says. 'And if anyone wants a tiny piece of advice, if you keep writing, even when you've got nothing to say, you come out the other side very quickly.'
McDonald generally gets up at 4am for emails and social media — 'anything I can do that doesn't take up a whole heap of brain power' — and then spends a bit of time on the back verandah drinking coffee and watching the clouds roll past the gumtrees.
'My friends say it's procrastinating but I like to think of it as percolating,' she chuckles. 'We writers, we might not look very busy on the outside sometimes, but our brains are going 100 miles an hour.'
Her morning routine also now includes a walk with her dog, Shadow. Because while some writers might relish total quiet, McDonald isn't one of them.
'I'm an empty-nester now so I've only got my border collie at home, and she's quite new to me,' McDonald says. 'She's a rescue dog so she came to me in October, and I'm so very happy that she is there, making noise in my house.'
The Prospect by Fleur McDonald, published by HarperCollins, is out now