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About Me
Why I Write
I have always enjoyed a good story. My parents used to tell true stories around the dinner table and one of my uncles could tell tales so tall you couldn't climb over them with a ladder. There are some who say I can tell tall stories too but I don't listen to those people.
Two things I love are reading and writing and I think to be a good writer you must be a keen reader as well.
Books have always been part of my life. It did take me a while to get published though. My first book did not appear until I was forty-five years old. That proves it is never too late to get started.
I was born at the end of 1945 in St. George, a small town in western Queensland, Australia. World War II had just finished and the world was full of hope. I do not remember anything about it but it does tell you that I am no longer young.
My first eight years were spent on a sheep station and I did not see other children very often so I used my imagination a lot and played with the dogs, cats, horses, chooks, cows and sheep. My mother taught me first with the help of correspondence lessons then I went off to the local boarding school when I was about seven. I hated it. It was the first time in my life I was forced to eat mashed potato, grey lumpy stuff. Ugh!
We moved to Toowoomba, a small provincial city, when I was eight. I had left a place where there were not many more than seventy-three kids in the whole school and came to one where there were that many in my third grade class alone. What a shock!
At school I loved to write but only when I could choose the topic. When I was in high school (boarding school again) I began to write a novel about a boy and his dog. I had almost filled a thick exercise book with tiny writing when the study supervisor discovered that I was not doing homework and tossed it into the bin. After that I took to writing poetry because it was easier to hide.
Eventually I studied speech therapy at the University of Queensland but looking back I should have become a librarian.
Things I've Done
I have lived in quite a few places in Australia and for three years in the United States. While I lived in America I read all the library books my children brought home from school. That led me to try my hand at writing once more. I studied children's literature and began to write. Guess what? All the American publishers thought I sounded too Australian. And when I came back to Australia I was told I did not sound Australian enough! I didn't go out to work when my children were small but when we settled in Brisbane I took a job in a school library in Ferny Grove. Here I was surrounded by books so I took piles of them home to read each week. The Principal told everyone I wrote stories so that forced my hand and I had to get serious about writing. I started off writing short stories and poems for magazines and enough were published to keep me full of enthusiasm. I worked at that library for almost fifteen years.
My husband, David, and I always wanted to live in the country like we had when we were kids so we bought a small farm not too far from Brisbane near a lovely country town called Kilcoy. This is where I live now. We have cattle, two dogs called Bonnie and Clyde and several chooks. I am always very busy. I have four grown-up daughters and ten gorgeous grandkids (that's ten reasons why I am so busy). When I am not writing, chasing cattle or dodging cow pats, I research my family history, garden, patchwork, dance and daydream (I call it thinking).
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