Within 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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!

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.

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.

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.

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.

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."

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.