The memoir of my first marriage and the loss of my children has been a long time gestating, with many revisions. Now, it is sitting in the wings, one step away from publication. I applied for a fellowship at Katharine Susannah Prichard Writer's Centre, in the hills [...]
Yesterday, I was delighted to receive a copy of the literary journal, Antipodes: A Global Journal of Australian/NZ literature. My painting of Uluru is on the cover. I painted this a couple of years ago from a friend's photo. Later that year, the editor of Antipodes contacted me, [...]
I've been back nearly a week from a visit to the centre of Australia, and I'm still dreaming of the desert and the people. I travelled on the Ghan from Adelaide to Alice Springs. The train journey was forgettable, apart from the scenery and a very interesting [...]
After over twenty years of writing my childhood memoir, it has been accepted for publication by Ginninderra Press; should be out about May or June next year. GP is a small independent publisher; here is their profile: Ginninderra Press, described in The Canberra Times as 'versatile and visionary', is [...]
My mother had a Singer treadle sewing machine, and made most of the clothes we wore. She bought Butterick and Simplicity patterns; sometimes her efforts turned out well, but sometimes they were disappointing. When I was about eleven, I went to my first dance, the Picnic Races [...]
A wedding fragment I found a piece of material that I cut out of my wedding dress. 1960, aged 20, I married the man who was supposed to give me the security I had lost in childhood, when my father disappeared carrying a suitcase. My mother was [...]
Hello lovely readers, and happy new year! May 2018 be a year of love, laughter, creativity and compassion. I have a mission this year, beyond my usual writing and editing practice. It came up for me unexpectedly, when my eldest daughter returned to me a bundle of [...]
Recently I've been thinking about my life, all the twists and turns it has taken. It has opened out now into a very gentle and lovely place, in a beautiful valley near the Border Ranges, which divide New South Wales from Queensland. Dominating the valley are the [...]
A lot of stuff is talked about the fine line between fiction and fact, truth and lies. The truth is, we only ever tell as much of the truth as we know at the time, and when it comes to story telling, my truth may be your [...]
Portraits in paint, ink and other visual media are a form of life writing. Many portraits, for me, are static, showing a public persona, dressed and posed in a manner the subject considers presentable. In contemporary portraiture, this formality has been disrupted by iconoclastic representations of ordinary [...]
