Events

I grew up in a house without books. My parents loved TV, and occasionally listened to one of our two LPs — Johnny Cash and Elvis Presley — but they weren’t in the habit of reading.

One day, I heard …

I once had coffee with a fellow author – let’s call him Justin Heazlewood – and a few minutes in, of commiserating about the writer’s lot, I was bemoaning that I’d wasted an entire year on some aborted project or …

I was a backpacking 21-year-old when I got off a ferry from southern Spain to the port city of Tangier in Morocco with four Australian friends. Once on land, we had to run the gauntlet of what we called, simply, …

The wind is changing and I’m not even talking about the elections. This particular wind is breezing through my blog, which is now eight years old.

For eight years I’ve kept the same hybrid format, publishing my eclectic musings about …

I was boarding the plane in Paris on my way home from the annual memoir-writing workshop, when I had a sudden jolt of recognition. That magnificent head of swinging auburn hair several metres ahead could only belong to my ex-friend …

I was separated from three of my children, the first at the end of the 1960s when I was seventeen. A familiar story in those years. Unmarried mothers were often hidden away, and babies adopted shortly after birth. An agreement …

For some years I’d entertained a shy little dream to write a book loosely based on this blog you’re reading right now. At the same time, the oh-so-familiar refrain of ‘who are you to advise others on writing?’ kept playing …

In 2017, my boyfriend was diagnosed with Hodgkin’s lymphoma. We had been dating for roughly two years but were still to reach many of our dating milestones – meeting one another’s family and friends, travelling together, living together and plenty …

When I arrived in central Australia in 1999, I fell in love with the place I’d entered – a world that seemed to both exist in the country we call Australia, as well as spin on its own axis. From …

A few minutes after signing the publishing contract for my memoir, Ten Thousand Aftershocks, once the euphoria subsided, the reality of what I had done descended. The manuscript I had written at my kitchen counter and on my couch, …