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<td valign="top"> <p><font size="2" face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif"><img src="images/portrait_intro.jpeg" width="231" height="279" align="left">Hi!
Welcome to the website of DI MORRISSEY, bestselling Australian
author of twelve novels. </font></p>
<p><font size="2" face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif">
If you haven't read any of my books or would like to find out
more about any of my novels, click on <a href="the_books.html">THE
BOOKS</a>.</font></p>
<p><font size="2" face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif">
If you like to know where to buy my books, click on <a href="wheretobuy.html">WHERE
TO BUY</a>.</font></p>
<p><font size="2" face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif">
If you'd like to know a little about me click on <a href="#aboutDi">ABOUT
DI</a> ..... If you'd like to know about Byron Bay where I live
in Australia, click on <a href="http://www.byron-bay.com" target="_top">BYRON-BAY.COM</a>.</font></p>
<p><font size="2" face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif">For
current news and to receive my newsletter click on <a href="/cgi-bin/newsletter/index.cgi">MAIL
LIST</a></font></p>
<p> </p>
<p><font size="2" face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif">
To leave me a message, please use my <a href="guestbook.html">GUEST
BOOK</a>.</font></p>
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<p align="left"><img src="images/pixel.gif" width="580" height="2"><br>
<font size="6" face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif"><a name="aboutDi"></a>R</font><font size="2" face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif">eaders
always ask me . . . where do I get my ideas and how did I start writing.<br>
I'm very lucky as writing comes as naturally to me as breathing. It
is, I believe, a gift, and I'm very grateful. Of course you can learn
and hone skills, but the art of storytelling is there or it's not.
</font></p>
<p align="left"><font size="2" face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif">
I grew up in a remote, magical, bushland retreat not far out of Sydney
called Pittwater. (Now a hideaway for the very wealthy). I made up
stories and was greatly influenced by 'bohemian' characters as they
were then considered - writers, musicans, artists and actors - who
lived there. One of Australia's first actors to really make it in
Hollywood (after the likes of Errol Flynn of course) - Chips Rafferty
- was a mentor and unoffical godfather. He taught me dozens of Australian
poems and a love of Australian culture, telling me bush myths and
his own experiences as a stockman (cowboy) before he started acting.</font></p>
<p align="left"><font size="2" face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif">
One of Australia's greatest women poets, Dorothea Mackellar, who wrote
'My Country' - which is as well known as the national anthem - befriended
me as a young girl when she was in her last years and she gave me
the profound awareness that I could make a life with using words.
That became my dream. That one day my stories would be in books for
other people to read. </font></p>
<p align="left"><font size="2" face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif">
Books were my childhood friends (I was an only child) and treasured.
My parents struggled financially but there was always a book for every
Christmas and birthday.</font></p>
<p align="left"><font size="2" face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif">
But one doesn't leave school and become an author. Tragedy sent our
family sideways with the death of my father and brother. My mother
became a wonderful role model. From never having worked except during
the war and later as a bookeeper to pay off her first husband's debt
(he'd abandoned her). Chips (the movie star) and the local community
at Pittwater raised money (for mother was left destitute) to send
the two of us to her sister in California. My aunt's husband was a
professor at UC Berkeley and later UCLA) and my mother did a film
and TV course there and came back to Australia and plunged into the
man's world of film and newly begun television. She carved a name
for herself as one of the founders of our film/TV industry, directing,
and later in marketing and administration of Australian films for
the Australian FIlm Commission and Film Australia.</font></p>
<p align="left"><font size="2" face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif">
She couldn't afford to send me to university ( you paid for it in
those days - a large sum - only rich kids went to university). So
my uncle, a foreign correspondent with ABC TV (Australia) marched
me into Australian Consolidated Press to start my writing career as
a copy kid. I knew every inch of that rambling (now plush but not
half as interesting) building that produced newspapers like The Daily
Telegraph, the Sun and the Mirror and magazines like The Australian
Women's Weekly. The thrashing noise of the printing presses in the
basement to the hectc sub's room, to the cloistered executive suite
rule by ageing Sir Frank Packer, became familiar territory to me.</font></p>
<p align="left"><font size="2" face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif">
I scribbled and pestered the chief-of-staff and subs until I was given
my cadetship and underwent four years of hard-nosed training as a
journalist that I now value enormously. Researching, tracking down
a story, writing concisely, and communicating as directly as possible
to the man and woman in the street, are skills I apply to novel writing.</font></p>
<p align="left"><font size="2" face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif">
I squirreled money away as best I could, working at night as a receptionist
in a smart restaurant and eventually, like so many of my generation,
used it as an opportunity to 'see the world.' We were then a generation
far removed from the global village.</font></p>
<p align="left"><font size="2" face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif">
I tackled the mecca of journalism, Fleet Street London. (I detoured
on the way via Cinecitta film studios in Rome writing exotic biographies
of starlets who'd never left home - my first foray into fiction.)
In London I paid the rent on my tiny bedsitter in Holland Park writing
short love stories for a teen magazine - no sex, no marriage! Then
I finally cracked a job as Women's Editor for Northcliffe Newspapers
(The Daily Mail Group). And so began four wild, fun and crazy years
in the 'swinging sixties' of London.</font></p>
<p align="left"><font size="2" face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif">
I re-met a handsome American Peace Corps volunteer who'd been in Indonesia
and when I travelled back to Australia and stopped off in Singapore
and Malaysia to see my uncle (the TV news correspondent) and we met
for dinner. Two weeks later we got engaged and were married in Sydney,
honeymooned in Sumatra in a remote village and were the only guests
at the old Lake Toba Hotel where President Sukarno had been held during
the war. Indonesia has held a strong fascination for me ever since.</font></p>
<p align="left"><font size="2" face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif">
We lived in Honolulu while Peter (Morrissey) did his Master's Degree
and I worked as a TV presenter for the CBS affiliate. Peter joined
the State Department and we were posted abroad as "the ideal
Foreign Service family."</font></p>
<p align="left"><font size="2" face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif">
Then followed twelve stimulating and fascinating years travelling
between Washington DC and postings in Singapore, Thailand, Japan,
Indonesia and Guyana. (I plan to draw on these experiences for future
books!)</font></p>
<p align="left"><font size="2" face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif">
But there remained the matter of my big dream. And while I wrote articles
and broadcast in various countries as well as being diplomatic hostess,
wife and mother, I was not fulfilling my desire to tell my own stories.</font></p>
<p align="left"><font size="2" face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif">
I tried. I sat in a room in our large Embassy residence and faced
the blank paper while the servants tiptoed around keeping the children
quiet because "Memsahib was writing." But nothing came into
my head, my fingers were still.</font></p>
<p align="left"><font size="2" face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif">
I saw in the future myself as this bitter old lady telling my children
for the upteenth time - "I could have written books you know,"
and them rolling their eyes and muttering, "There she goes again."
</font></p>
<p align="left"><font size="2" face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif">
So one morning I woke up and I knew I had to jump off the cliff, get
out and try to write. It wasn't a concsious decision to leave the
marriage but when you start down a path there is no turning back.
</font></p>
<p align="left"><font size="6" face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif">W</font><font size="2" face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif">ithin
a year I was back in Sydney planning on writing (initially) children's
quality TV drama. I needed to make a living as I had no money and
it was at this time Australia made it's first foray into breakfast
television. I joined Network Ten's "Good Morning Australia"
thinking I'd be home by 10am, only to find I was working late into
the day and evening and getting up at 3am to go into the studio to
phone Hollywood for a live entertainment spot, prepare my segment,
in addition to doing interviews and reviewing films. Later I expanded
into the first infotainment and travel segments. I researched, produced
and edited all my own stories.</font></p>
<p align="left"><font size="2" face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif">
This madness lasted seven years. A few years previously I had written
a treatment for a TV drama series and a friend who was a Literary
agent saw it and said I should turn it into a book. I forgot about
it. </font></p>
<p align="left"><font size="2" face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif">
Then one morning I woke up and knew this was the day I changed my
life and went after what I'd always wanted to do. I was on the TV
show Friday and not there Monday. I made a quiet and graceful exit.</font></p>
<p align="left"><font size="2" face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif">
Then came the hard part. I did some freelance journalism for current
affairs TV shows, newspapers and magazines to earn some money while
I wrote a series of children's TV drama prgrammes based around ghost
stories. Then my friend the agent rang to say she had shown my original
TV treatment to a publisher who wanted to commission me to turn it
into a novel.</font></p>
<p align="left"><font size="2" face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif">
I knew I had to put all my eggs in this one basket and go for it.
I'd talked all my life about writing books - now I had to prove myself.</font></p>
<p align="left"><font size="2" face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif">
<img src="images/portrait_ondeck.gif" width="288" height="229" align="right">It
was a testing time and I learned a lot - about writing and about myself.
But HEART OF THE DREAMING was published in 1991 and was a huge success.
It was set in Longreach, Western Queensland about a young woman's
fight to save her property - her dreaming place.</font></p>
<p align="left"><font size="2" face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif">
I had already started my second novel and I chose to write something
with a different setting. THE LAST ROSE OF SUMMER is set in Sydney
and the rainforest area of the northern rivers of NSW where I now
live. It's a lyrical story that blends a contemporary story with an
Edwardian story and established me as a writer "in there for
the long haul." My publisher, Pan Macmillan decided I should
bring out a book every Xmas. </font></p>
<p align="left"><font size="2" face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif">
Readers of "HEART OF THE DREAMING" demanded a sequel about
lead characters Queenie and TR. So "FOLLOW THE MORNING STAR"
came out in 1993. Readers still ask me to write another book in the
series, which I might. But not just yet. I have too many other stories
waiting in the wings!</font></p>
<p align="left"><font size="2" face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif">
All my books are born out of the landscape of a particular place.
After living so many years abroad when I came back to work on the
TV show I travelled around Australia and fell in love with my country
and its people and knew that's what I had to write about.</font></p>
<p align="left"><font size="2" face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif">
I research my books meticulously so that the background to the fictional
story is accurate. For HEART OF THE DREAMING I worked on a property.
For THE LAST ROSE OF SUMMER (inspired by a real Edwardian mansion
under threat by developers) I studied Australia's role in World War
One by reading history and visiting retirement homes and speaking
to war veterans and listening to their anecdotes) and immersing myself
in the days of the British raj. I also spent time in Yarralla the
old mansion on the banks of the Parramatta River (I called it Zanana)
which is now part of the Concord Hospital.</font></p>
<p align="left"><font size="2" face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif">
For "FOLLOW THE MORNING STAR" I went back to wool properties
(during a wool crisis and drought) and wove in the hardships and heroism
of the people on the land.</font></p>
<p align="left"><font size="2" face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif">
During the promotion of "FOLLOW THE MORNING STAR" I visited
friends in the New England district of NSW just before Christmas who
took me to a carol evening. This meant driving for an hour and arriving
in a paddock in the middle of nowhere. Other families and friends
arrived, chairs were set up on the grass, tea and sandwiches were
passed around and as twilight fell, candles were lit, song sheets
handed out and together we sang our favourite carols beneath a starry
sky on a warm summer's evening. It was more spiritual than being in
any cathedral. </font></p>
<p align="left"><font size="2" face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif">
As it was the coming International Year of the Family, it made me
think of family, of how our definition of family had changed and I
felt we'd lost something - like old fashioned traditional values -
in the transition. I thought about my own family and how precious
they suddenly seemed. I decided to write a novella that might make
readers go to someone in their family and say - "I've never said
it, but I love you, I think you're special, or I'm proud of you."</font></p>
<p align="left"><font size="2" face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif">
So I set THE LAST MILE HOME in a country town in the 1950's and from
the response it seems to have touched people's hearts which makes
me happy.</font></p>
<p align="left"><font size="6" face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif">A</font><font size="2" face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif">nd
so we come to TEARS OF THE MOON.</font></p>
<p align="left"><font size="2" face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif">
I had visited the pearling town of Broome during my TV days and was
entranced with it's history. I knew it was a novelist's goldmine so
I went and spent time there to reseach. Everything that happens to
Lily at the start of the book happened to me (except I had met Aborigines
before.)</font></p>
<p align="left"><font size="2" face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif">
I wanted to move more into mainstream fiction as I was being perceived
as romance writer. The book became a turning point for me. It moved
me into hardback and was published in the US and UK. </font></p>
<p align="left"><font size="2" face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif">
Each book comes as a strange gift and I wait for whatever fateful
circumstance brings each novel to me. When a lost postcard from Guyana
finally found me I returned to this exotic South American country
where I had been posted during my diplomatic life. WHEN THE SINGING
STOPS has a strong environmental/political/adventure/love story/ women's
commitment/ conflict theme! </font></p>
<p align="left"><font size="2" face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif">The
title alludes to the rare golden frog found only in bromelliad plants
at the lip of Kaiteur Falls in Guyana. When writing the book I asked
professor Mike Tyler of Adelaide University's Zoology dept the name
of this rare frog (hydroloxus bibi) and he told that frogs are the
harbingers of the state of the health of the planet - "and when
the frogs stop singing, the planet will die."</font></p>
<p align="left"><font size="2" face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif">
Another fateful connection led me to write THE SONGMASTER. In an airport
I ran into a woman friend - a pastoralist from the remote Kimberley
region of western Australia - whom I hadn't seen in nine years. I
asked what she was doing and she told me she had been asked by a wise
Aboriginal elder to gather a group of white people to come and sit
down with his people and talk about how to bring black and white Australians
closer together. She told me didn't know how or where she'd find the
right people so dcided they'd find her. "You've found me, that
means you must come, " she said. So off I went to the Kimberley
and one of the most profound experiences of my life. You can share
the journey in THE SONGMASTER.</font></p>
<p align="left"><font size="2" face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif">
My connection with the Australian film industry goes back to my childhood
with Chips Rafferty and a young actor called Rod Taylor. My mother
told me many stories of the early days of film and television and
from my own research I knew that Australia made the world's first
feature film. So I decided I wanted to write about the Australian
film industry, the early days of radio and a larrikin aussie actor
like Errol Flynn. I also was interested in the path men were travelling
in the 1990's. </font></p>
<p align="left"><font size="2" face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif">
All my books are mass market, mainstream entertainment, yet there
is a depth and complexity beneath the surface where I explore an issue
or theme that interests, engages or concerns me.</font></p>
<p align="left"><font size="2" face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif">
In the case of SCATTER THE STARS I kept in touch with the men who
had travelled to the Kimberley with me and I became aware that these
older men were reflecting back on their lives with some disquiet and
asking, "Is this all there is?"</font></p>
<p align="left"><font size="2" face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif">
<img src="images/portrait_onbeach.jpeg" width="237" height="289" align="right">I
spoke with younger men and discovered that men in the 90s were feeling
marginalised, vulnerable and somewhat confused. They were seeking
what we all are - inner peace, contentment and a spiritual foundation
in their lives. So I chose the main character to be an actor for they
wear many masks and play many roles, often without knowing who they
really are. It has been interesting to hear how this book has affected
men and family and friends in their orbit. There are many different
characters with very modern problems and issues in SCATTER THE STARS
that readers identify with.</font></p>
<p align="left"><font size="2" face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif">
I try to make every book a little different, so that they are not
predictable or formula. Though at the same time I keep the elements
of page-turning storytelling that my readers seem to enjoy.</font></p>
<p align="left"><font size="2" face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif">I
feel so lucky that I am able to make a living doing what I enjoy most.
I hope I bring a little enjoyment to you, my readers, as well.</font></p>
<p align="left"><font size="2" face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif">
Fond wishes.</font></p>
<p align="left"><font size="2" face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif"><br>
<i><font size="3">Di Morrissey </font></i></font></p>
<p align="left"><font size="2" face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif">
</font></p>
<p align="left"> </p>
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