Marlee rancher biography

The youngest of four children, MarLee Vause nee Balka grew up in Riverside, Utah; a small farming community 77 miles north of Salt Lake City.  Her father was a farmer, a rancher and a geologist. Her mother was a homemaker and violinist in the Utah Symphony Orchestra.  Her grandmother was one of the first women to graduate from the University of Utah, a path she later followed.   Her formative years were spent working on the farm, riding horses and in the winter, with schoolwork in hand, she would travel with her parents to geologically rich areas of the country and walk dry riverbeds with her father.

Vause entered Utah State University in 1964 and worked in a small 17 bed hospital where she was trained to perform lab studies and x-rays, assisting in the surgery and emergency departments. She then transferred to Weber State University, Ogden, Utah, and worked as a dental assistant as she pursued her Associate Registered Nursing degree.  After graduation, she worked as the nursing supervisor of the University of Utah’s first family practice residency program.   At the insistence of the chair of the Department of Family and Community Medicine, Dr. Hilman Castle, she entered the PA program at the University of Utah in 1975, completing the program in December 1977.  She completed her bachelor’s degree from the PA department in 1978 from the same university.

In 1977, the US Department of Health and Human Services funded a rural health grant program for the education of an interdisciplinary team approach to patient care.  The University of Utah was awarded one of eight national grants and established a family medicine clinic in Vernal, Utah with the grant money. Still working for the University at that time, Vause moved to Vernal and was an integral part of the training of the family medicine residents and nurse practitioner, pharmacy, and psychology students rotating through the clinic. She educated the diverse team to work together as a cohes

Not to be confused with Sarah Henderson.

Sara Jane Henderson (15 September 1936 – 29 April 2005) 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 Rivercattle station in the Northern Territory of Australia.

Life in the Northern Territory

Henderson moved to Bullo River Station, 360 kilometres south-west of Darwin with her husband Charles, an American ex-serviceman, and her three daughters, Marlee, Bonnie and Danielle. When Charles died in 1985, the station was more than $750,000 in debt. Henderson and her daughters rebuilt the business, an effort which won her Businesswoman of the Year in 1991. She then published her autobiography From Strength to Strength in 1993 which focused on rebuilding the property after her husband's death.

After deciding to sell the station and retire to Queensland, Henderson and her eldest daughter Marlee Ranacher had a well-publicised falling out. After legal proceedings, Marlee and her husband Franz purchased Bullo River Station in 2001. They later sold it in 2015.

Later life

Henderson became a spokesperson for BreastScreen Australia and urged women over 50 to have regular mammograms to discover breast cancer. In 2000 she discovered that she herself had breast cancer. She died at a hospital in Caloundra in Queensland on 29 April 2005 from leukaemia.

Bibliography

References

Australian author

Marlee Ranacher is an Australian author. She is also a cancer survivor, wife, mother of two sons, pilot, cook, Bull catcher and cattle musterer, bulldozer driver and accomplished horsewoman. She lives with her Austrian-born husband Franz and two sons, Ben and Franz. Ranacher's LinkedIn profile lists her as 'Director' of 'Farming' 'Industry' located in the Northern Territory of Australia.

Early life

Ranacher is the eldest daughter of American ex-serviceman, Charles and his wife, acclaimed author Sara Henderson, and was raised on the remote top-end cattle station Bullo River in the Victoria River District of the Northern Territory of Australia. She and husband Franz acquired the property in March 2001 from her mother after a legal battle documented on the ABC's Australian Story 2001. The Ranachers hoped to create a unique ecotourism destination at Bullo River.

Life in the Northern Territory

Bullo River was put on the market for the first time in 2011, amidst the fallout from Indonesian live cattle export bans. An interview with Ranacher was broadcast on the Nine Network's60 Minutes program about the effect of the Gillard government's bans. This prompted the August 2011 Cattlemen's drive to Canberra from Perth and Cairns.

In early 2012, Ranacher's small Cessna airplane's engine failed while she was searching for cattle on the Victoria River floodplain; forcing her to land wheels up on a mud bank of a three kilometer wide river with a fast incoming tide of 7.5 meters. She struggled through the mud, then swam 500 meters to the riverbank. Ranacher later said "our bad fortune losing the plane was in fact good fortune". Ranacher received an insurance payout from the crash of the Cessna and she said that this enabled them to hang on, though tenuously, until later in the year when with a second bit of luck they were able t