About

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I grew up in a family of storytellers who considered a laugh at a story’s end to be fairly important. My father was a forester, and during my early years we lived in the small country towns of Macksville and Casino in northern NSW. My mother was, without doubt, the beautiful star of our family. She was an accomplished soprano, and when our town put on its musical – an Oklahoma or a Carousel – she was invariably given the lead. My three siblings and I would sit in the front seats, spellbound.

My father had a passion for opera and literature – he came from a family of writers and academics – and books filled our home along with music. But that said, as a young child my sole ambition in life, my dream, was to own a lolly shop. I genuinely couldn’t imagine anything better.

When I was eight, our family moved to the city of Newcastle and it was there that I built an enduring sense of home. It was the place where I made lifelong friends, studied, got my first job, had my first date with my husband. It was where I said goodbye to my mother.  

My mother died in my last year of school, and it’s a loss that, forty years later, I still grapple with in some small way or another.  

My first reading obsession was for Agatha Christie novels - how I adored a good mystery! – and I devoured everything she wrote, and then read the best ones again. But it was To Kill a Mockingbird that changed everything for me, showed me how truly moving and inspirational a novel could be. The dream of one day writing my own novel began forming in my studious teenage self (the lolly shop plan now ditched), but it was a faint, faraway dream, almost too beautiful or wonderful to imagine ever happening.

I became an accountant when I finished school. Some people appear astonished by that, and I was possibly a bit astonished I’d chosen it. What happened to literature, the subject I loved, the one that came more naturally to me? It was a choice ultimately steered by caution: my mother was gone and I’d lost any sense of a safety net in life. Accounting looked dependable, and besides, I did like maths and patterns; and in the end, accounting enabled me to see the world. In my twenties I worked in London and travelled extensively in Europe, and when I returned to Australia I lived and worked in Sydney. I stayed in accounting for fifteen years, in my safe career, and I was quite happy with that. I’d found most accountants, rather ironically, to be funny.

I left accounting to have my three children and never really returned. I finally let my creative self out in the world. My new passion was for food, and my family were dished up fancy meals most nights of the week, sometimes pleading to be just served something simple. I catered for friends’ parties out of a pure love for it. I returned to reading voraciously.

But it wasn’t until I was forty, and came very close to dying, that my dream of writing a book gathered force. I was mortal, my time was limited, and the one thing I was certain I would regret if I didn’t do it was writing a novel. And so, I started to write in between everything else in my life. And then, in the past several years, everything else had to fit in with my writing.

THE WAKES is my first published novel, but another one, my first manuscript, sits in a drawer in my bedside table. It’s the novel I wrote to teach myself how to write, to learn how to manage the unwieldy thing a novel can be. And it’s also in the drawer because it holds far too much of my own life masquerading as fiction. 

I don’t think I will ever stop feeling a quiet thrill, and a deep satisfaction, when I call myself a writer. When I hold my own book in my hand.

I now live in Willoughby, Sydney, with my husband and daughter and our puppy, Teddy. I am currently working on my next novel.