Tanya Heaslip

and she'd go to School of the Air and get a box full of books.

I was very bookish, and that gave me this curiosity of the outside world and what was this overseas place like.

I longed to know what these lands were that had snow-capped mountains and daffodil-strewn meadows and lakes.

That looked weird to you, I suppose, didn't it?

Oh, it just, I couldn't, I'd never seen it, so I could only imagine it.

So, Tanya, at some point it was time to send you to boarding school and this girl who's grown up in the outback who knows how to disembowel a slaughtered cow is going to a posh boarding school in Adelaide.

Can I go out on a limb here and say it was probably awful to begin with?

It was just hideous.

It was...

hideous.

I think most kids who go to boarding school at age 12, especially if you're a child of the outback and you know nothing about the outside world, you've never been in a classroom, you've never been in a city, you've never been in four walls of an institution.

It was like being in prison.

It was hideous.

And how about those nice Adelaide girls from nice homes, nice hams in Adelaide?

How did they treat you as the roughest guts girl?

Well, yeah, and I was rough as guts.

Interestingly, the boarders were all from South Australian country.

So they were the girls I spent most of my time with.

It was, you know, the daybugs, as we called them, in the classroom didn't really mix with us.

It took several years, I guess, before we started really intermingling and they...