A journalist from Perth, Western Australia, Marie Mahood met her husband Joe Mahood while working at Victoria River Downs in the Northern Territory. Together they built up the cattle station Mongrel Downs in the Tanami Desert in the Northern Territory and later a station in central Queensland, which she continued to work after her husband's death in a helicopter accident. A public speaker on her life in the Australian bush, Mahood wrote memoirs, novels and newspaper columns about the outback with 'authenticity and great understanding of the vast Australian bush...' She also wrote the text for the non-fiction work The Australian Stockman (Lansdowne, 1988). (Source: biogr. notes in A Bunch of Strays and Crocodile Dreaming, CQU Press, 1996 and 1999)
