When I began thinking about my new novel, Wild Lands, as always I was mindful of my own rural background and the pioneering spirit required by my family when they first selected land in the northwest of New South Wales. Ive always drawn on my familys history for inspiration when it comes to writing my [...]
No-one knows how old this map is. No doubt if I studied it carefully I may well be able to work out the dates as the pink shaded areas depict those lands falling under the rule of the British Crown (British Malaya, Hong Kong, India, New Zealand, Australia, Canada - among others). I do know [...]
From the Burdekin Writer's Festival in Far North QLD where a croc-wrestling bush poet got into a fight outside the local and had to be taken to hospital by an eminent historian (who says writer's fests are boring?)... to a film crew descending on the property to talk books and farming ...followed [...]
When my great-grandfather moved westward from the New England north-west region of Inverell in the early 1890s to our current property he built a homestead on one of two separate holdings. The property was called Mona and the original house was of mud-brick and cypress pine. This early building was made with the black soil mud found on the property with the bricks [...]
Well Ive been digging around in the family archives again. This time searching for information from the 1950s for one of my works-in-progress. Opening boxes at our place is a bit like Christmas at times. You never know what gems youre going to discover. Authenticity is mandatory when youre writing bush stories with a historical [...]
If you enjoy history ... Many of you know that all of my novels to date have relied heavily on the Alexander Family archives which date back over one hundred and twenty years and cover station life from the 1880s on. As you can imagine with such a rich resource my interest in history was [...]
When I began thinking about my new novel, The Great Plains, I was mindful of my own rural background and as with my previous works I wanted to be able to draw on rural Australia and our fascinating history. My aim was to write an epic narrative that told the story of two lands, two [...]
Being a writer has its positives and negatives. The negatives include a healthy amount of doubt about the quality of your work, a feeling that, hopefully drives you to refine and polish your words until they shine. But my main quandary is one of twin passions competing for my time. When I'm holed up in my [...]
HISTORICAL NOVEL SOCIETY AUSTRALASIA INAUGURAL CONFERENCE 2015 Love Historical Fiction? I do. I'm delighted to be one of the speakers for this inaugural conference to be held in March 2015. I'll be joining the likes of Kate Forsyth, Colin Falconer, Toni Jordan, Sophie Masson, Blanche DAlpuget and Isolde Martyn, and many more historical novelists. The Historical Novel Society [...]
The Great Plains, will be released November 3rd and as always it's with mixed feelings that I introduce another baby, my fifth novel in as many years, into the world. Excited, anxious and hopeful spring to mind when it comes to describing my general state of anxiousness this afternoon, as tomorrow I start a three [...]