Tanya Heaslip

I am an Australian author and storyteller from outback Central Australia. Having spent much of my life traversing the ‘road less travelled’, I’ve now written three memoirs about different phases of my life. It all began when I grew up on an isolated cattle station north of Alice Springs in the 1960s and 70s, schooled via Correspondence School and two-way radio through School of the Air. I captured these childhood stories in ‘An Alice Girl.’ At 12 years old, I was sent thousands of kilometres away to boarding school, which was brutal, but ultimately I became the first student from School of the Air to go on to graduate from Law School. ‘Beyond Alice’ describes those coming of age years in dangerous detail! I built my career in law – focusing as much as possible around outback issues because of my passion and interest in the land. Highlights included working as the Junior Instructing Solicitor on the Lindy Chamberlain Inquiry, and litigation involving mining magnates in multi-million dollar disputes. In the meantime, curiosity about the outside world led me to the foot of the Berlin Wall as it fell in November 1989. Later I found myself in a tiny Eastern Bloc town where no one spoke English, and then onto fairytale Prague, a city of spires and castles and cobblestones. There I used my legal background to teach English to lawyers and judges, assisting them as they emerged out of communist control into a new world of democratic law and human rights (I also used a few School of the Air songs I’d learnt to play by guitar to showcase outback Australia to them!). ‘Alice to Prague’ was born from these life-changing sojourns. Returning to Australia, I worked as a consultant, lawyer and in-house legal counsel in Western Australia for twenty three years, before moving back, full-circle, to Alice Springs. I still work in the field of law but have been able to also put my boots back in the soil and write my three memoirs, which were published by Allen & Unwin from 2019-21: Alice to Prague (AU 2019), An Alice Girl (AU 2020) and Beyond Alice (AU 2021). My passion is telling the stories of the outback, the resilient and courageous people who live here, and the characters who have come and gone. I want to preserve those stories and bring them to the rest of Australia. My media coverage extends across Television, Radio, Podcast and Print Journalism.