[2] McInerny became a demonstrator and then assistant geography lecturer at the University of Melbourne in 1919,[3] supporting her family after her father's death.
[2] Prior to the 1960s it was difficult for married women to find employment in Australia, and her marriage in 1928 was the end of Sherrard's paid career in geosciences.
[5] She published 15 research papers in refereed journals between 1928 and 1975,[3] attended domestic and international conferences and undertook fieldwork, sometimes taking her two sons with her.
In this role she convened a sub-committee which studied the effects of nutrition on child growth and worked on problems of food storage and distribution in the event of any large scale evacuation from cities during World War II.
[3][6] In 1950 she spent three months at the University of Cambridge and the Sedgwick Museum studying under Dr Gertrude Elles, and in 1967 examined fossil collections in Peking (later Beijing).