The first published novel of Australian writer Nancy Cato, who died on July 3rd aged 83, was a bestseller. All the Rivers Run (1958), a saga of life along the Murray, Australia's largest river, made her modestly rich and famous, popularised Australia overseas and became a television series.
The novel took a decade to write, and its success, especially in the US, enabled her to give up journalism - she had been the Queensland correspondent of the Canberra Times - and focus on her writing and love of conservation. The book became the first of a trilogy - with Time, Flow Softly (1959) and But Still the Stream (1962) - which, when published in a single volume, became popular worldwide. Ever the patriotic, fifth-generation Australian, she was unimpressed when her British publishers mistakenly put a Mississippi steamer, with its stern paddle, on the cover instead of a Murray steamer, whose paddles are amidships.
She discovered the Murray river on a holiday in the 1930s. Her family believed the first novel's leading character, Philadelphia Gordon, was in part modelled on the author, who married at 24 and had three children in three years.
In all, she wrote more than 10 big novels, often featuring strong, outback women. She also produced volumes of poetry, short stories and The Noosa Story: A Study in Unplanned Development (1979), an environmental work about her adopted Queensland home.
She started writing at the age of eight - when she composed a short poem about a violet - and 10 years later won a short-story competition run by the News, the local paper in her hometown of Adelaide. Her imaginary "interview" with Oliver Twist led to her being taken on as a trainee journalist - with time off to go to university - but she recalled that, as a woman, she had to fight to get into the reporters' room.
In 1941, she married the racing driver Eldred Norman and started writing seriously. There were short stories in the Bulletin magazine and, in 1950, she published her first poetry collection, The Darkened Window.
Nancy Cato was a founder member of the Lyrebird Writers, a group that published verse collections, and was part of the Jindyworobak literary movement, which respected and worked with the Aboriginal perception of the outback.
But her early novels were not always well received, and the manuscript of one ended up being flung into the Thames. It was read by Paul Scott, of Raj quartet fame, who said she had a good writer's eye - but still turned it down. "I had rejection, rejection, rejection," she recalled. "If you can't take rejection, you'll never be a writer."
Seven years later, another collection, The Dancing Bough (1957), brought her wider acclaim before the appearance of All the Rivers Run.
Brown Sugar (1974), a novel about Queensland and the trade in indentured workers from the south Pacific, was another success. She also wrote three books about Tasmania, one about the last Aboriginal woman on the island, Queen Truganini (1976), and A Distant Island (1988), based on the life of botanist Ronald Gunn. The Heart of the Continent, about two generations of outback and wartime nurses, followed in 1989.
Nancy Cato was honoured with a doctorate of letters by the University of Queensland in 1990. She became something of a local icon in the popular seaside resort of Noosa. She was a founding member of the local euthanasia society and received awards for her conservation work. In later life, she suffered from rheumatoid arthritis and mini-strokes, which never diminished her lust for life. Her daughter and two sons survive her.
Nancy Cato: born 1917; died, July 2000