How writing eventually found me .....

When I was 12 I found the strangest thing in outback Queensland … shells and crustaceans poking out of the cliff walls hundreds of kilometres from the sea. They were fossils. That day started my fascination for fossils and interest in this ancient land's amazing pre-history. Years later, I wrote an adventure novel set on a Queensland outback fossil dig.

Books have always been my friends. I remember the first book that fired this passion, and exactly where I was at the time - on the front steps of my country town’s library, reading - for hours. My parents were on the verge of sending out a search party. I was seven, and the book was C.S. Lewis’s The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe.

On the way to becoming an author I worked at lots of jobs in Australia, New Zealand and the UK. Then I studies to become a Primary School teacher - an excellent career move; but again, just another step towards writing. I also taught Adult Literacy, attended art school part-time and started writing a children's novel. In 2002, after a mentorship with the Australian Society of Authors and working on my junior fiction novel, Secrets of Eromanga, Lothian Books published it in 2006.

Writing is my life now.

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AUTHOR VISITS ....  SPEAKERS INK Queensland:  For school and library booking

U.K. LITERARY AGENT: ROSEMARY CANTER - Head of Children's Books, UNITED AGENTS, London.

1.   Ruined railway station - on the way to the Flinders Ranges, SA
2.   Queensland authors and illustrators at SCBWI, Maleny, 2008 - lots of talking, eating and laughing!