Readers always ask me . . . where do I get my ideas and how did I start writing.
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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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."

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!)

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.

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.

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."

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 conscious decision to leave the marriage but when you start down a path there is no turning back.