[AustrE or NeoZE?] peculiar pronoun usage

Hello

Shirley Hazzard in her novel /The Great Fire/ has some of her characters use the pronoun "she" in a peculiar way.

For instance, this, in reference to a letter:

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"Would you like--I don't know--some document? A letter of recommendation?"
"Thanks, I hadn't thought about it--but yair, thanks, she'd be good."

The second character is Australian and says things like "Yair" and "arvo", which I know to be typically Australian, but I'd never noticed that "she" usage before.
-----------------------

In the second extract, the referent is not really obvious.

The setting: New Zealand. The context: a father has been promising his wife and daughter that they would make a trip to Britain, but has repeatedly broken his promise over the years.

"The girl was sorry for him, knew he would be concerned for expense and ill at ease abroad; even that he dreaded the entire enterprise. But she'd said, "I'd like to have the chance," without comprehending all that this implied. Still examining vacancy, the father had replied, "Ar well. Next year she'll be right."

The father is not talking about either his daughter or his wife, but about something unspecified, the journey, maybe?

Come to think of it, in the first extract, "she" doesn't seem to refer to the letter either, but to the much more general fact of being given a letter. I guess in both cases the more standard usage would be "it".

Can you shed any light on the matter?


--
Isabelle Cecchini
.

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