Novelist
Poet

I am one of four writers awarded the 2016 Byron Writers Festival (BWF) Residential Mentorship for my crime novel, River People.

I have written two unpublished crime novels: Mausoleum of Memories set in 1950s New York; and River People, set in present day Lismore. I started writing full time nine years ago as prior to that I was involved in my demanding work and family life.

I have a semi-regular column in the BWF’s newsletter, Northerly, called Written In Blood; and I have done a number of book reviews for them. I have also written book reviews for Sisters in Crime.
I have a Bachelor of Arts majoring in English Literature and Sociology and I have completed a number of writing workshops including a two week writing retreat in the Moroccan desert with Jan Cornall and other writers. I started down the crime writing track when I took a class with Marele Day. Marele also mentored me on my first pages of Mausoleum of Memories and the BWF Mentorship. I have been in writing groups for the last nine years; and am a member of: BWF, Writing NSW, Australian Society of Authors, Katherine Susannah Pritchard Writers Centre, Sisters In Crime and the Australian Crime Writers Association. I also volunteer at the BWF.

In my younger days I worked as a shelf stacker, a nurse and an Assistant to the Editor of House and Garden magazine, where I wrote a number of articles and had my own advice column. I was a domestic violence crisis counsellor going to scenes with the police and assisting survivors with court and housing. I have been a sex discrimination conciliator with The Human Rights Commission; a debt counsellor, social worker, electorate assistant, a law researcher, and a committee secretary at a number of universities.

My variety of workplaces required me to become highly skilled in writing and editing submissions to Federal Ministers and government departments; policy documents, agendas, minutes and reports for university committees; and reports and research projects for the Human Rights Commission. I have excellent research skills. I guest lectured at Griffith University in domestic violence, essay writing, assertiveness, sex discrimination and sexual harassment.

I have travelled to some interesting places where so many things could have happened but they didn’t. I took a half price two week holiday to Fiji in the middle of a coup. When I travelled to Egypt I and my fellow travellers were corralled into an armed convoy because there were rebels in the area and they had killed a number of tourists the week before. When I was in Morocco the Australian Embassy was keeping tabs on me and the other writers as we were near the border and a number of Europeans had been kidnapped from Algeria. The Embassy thought a group of western women might be a target. When I was a teenager I hitch-hiked from Sydney to Darwin with a girlfriend and survived amorous truckies, an over-zealous railway linesman, an insistent travelling salesman and finally being dumped in Darwin and having to find my own way home.

I have lived all over Australia. I was raised on the northern beaches of Sydney and returned to Sydney in the ‘90s to live in Kings Cross. In the late ’60s I moved to Canberra, then to a number of small forestry towns in the south of Western Australia. I moved back to Canberra and from there to Brisbane, Canberra (again), Kings Cross and now Lismore.

I know about psychopaths from personal experience and extensive research. This may not seem relevant to a bio, but it is to my writing!