Libby Hathorn (1943-) Biography

Biographical and Critical Sources

BOOKS

Hathorn, Libby, Talks with My Skateboard, Australian Broadcasting Corp., 1991.

St. James Guide to Children's Writers, 5th edition, edited by Sara Pendergast and Tom Pendergast, St. James Press (Detroit, MI), 1999, pp. 482-483.

Saxby, Maurice, The Proof of the Puddin': Australian Children's Literature, 1970-1990, Ashton Scholastic, 1993, pp. 219-221.

PERIODICALS

Australian Bookseller and Publisher, March, 1992, p. 26.

Booklist, February 15, 1998, p. 1019.

Books for Keeps, November, 1996, p. 10.

Bulletin of the Center for Children's Books, April, 1991, Robert Strang, review of Thunderwith, p. 194; May, 1998, pp. 322-323.

Children's Book Review Service, August, 1998, review of Sky Sash So Blue, pp. 164-165.

Horn Book, March-April, 1989, Elizabeth S. Watson, review of Freya's Fantastic Surprise, p. 199; July, 1989, Karen Jameyson, review of The Tram to Bondi Beach, p. 474; July, 1991, Elizabeth S. Watson, review of Thunderwith, p. 462; July-August, 1998, p. 472.

Junior Bookshelf, October, 1990, p. 232.

Magpies, March, 1990, Karen Jameyson, review of Thunderwith, p. 4; March, 1993, p. 31; July, 1998, Jane Connolly, review of Rift, p. 38; November, 1999, p. 38; November, 1999, Annette Dale Meiklejohn, "Know the Author: Libby Hathorn," pp.10-13.

Publishers Weekly, May 17, 1991, review of Thunderwith, p. 65; August 1, 1994, p. 79; December 18, 1995, p.53; June 22, 1998, p. 91.

School Librarian, August, 1996, Mary Hoffman, review of Juke-box Jive, p. 105.

School Library Journal, July, 1989, Marianne Pilla, review of The Tram to Bondi Beach, p. 66; August, 1989, Louise L. Sherman, review of Freya's Fantastic Surprise, p. 120; May, 1991, p. 111; October, 1994, p. 123; March, 1996, p. 189; June, 1998, Carol Ann Wilson, review of Sky Sash So Blue, p. 108.

Times Literary Supplement, July 23, 1982, Ann Martin, "Encouraging the Excellent," p. 792.

Voice of Youth Advocates, June, 1991.

OTHER

Libby Hathorn Web site, http://www.libbyhathorn.com/ (January 26, 2005).*

Autobiography Feature

Libby Hathorn

Libby Hathorn contributed the following autobiographical essay to SATA: I wish I could say I was born abroad, in far off Africa or deep in Papua New Guinea, and it was my exotic, isolated childhood that fed my imagination so that I was destined to be a writer. Or that I was raised on a remote, sprawling cattle station in the outback of Australia, where books and radio were my only friends. But no! Mine was a suburban childhood, busy with two sisters and a brother for company, spent in Sydney, Australia. And this is where I have spent most of my life, despite traveling widely as an adult, and is a place that has had its significance in all my writing life.

In fact, I was born in the city of Newcastle, some two hours north of Sydney, where my father had been posted for two years during the Second World War. However, most of my early childhood was in the eastern suburbs of Sydney, at Maroubra where we lived, a little too far from Maroubra Beach; and my adolescence was spent at Tamarama, a more picturesque suburb. Our house, in a tiny but verdant valley park, was a stone's throw from the small (and later to become highly fashionable), treacherous, and yet quite lovely city beach. We could look out the kitchen window and see the breakers of the Pacific Ocean crash onto the fine yellow sand of Tamarama Beach any time of day, and I remember going to sleep strangely calmed by the rhythm and roar of that surf. And we could take the walk along rugged cliffs to the much loved expanse of nearby Bondi Beach. One of my early books, The Tram to Bondi Beach, celebrates this beach, albeit as it was way back in the 1930s. Even now I don't like to be inland, to be too far from the edge that's been part and parcel of my whole life.

And yet how I longed for Europe and England during my adolescent years, a desire fed by the books and movies I'd seen, that perpetuated the idea that "real Young Libby, ready for Sunday school, c. 1950s. life" was elsewhere. I was to discover much later certain riches were to be discovered "in my own backyard," so to speak, when I began writing stories. In fact, I'd written poetry since my early childhood, completing a rhyming alphabet when I was in second grade—a first remembered "publication" because of the praise my grandmother, in particular, gave it. I'd read every book I could lay my hands on in our house, many of them with English backgrounds, and many way beyond my years, so that I felt I knew England, country and city, as if it were my place. But at the same time, I was listening to many a story by different members of our large, extended family, set firmly in an Aussie setting.

Despite a lack of romantic origins, my childhood was rich—filled with the busy-ness of being part of a largish family of four children and countless aunts and uncles, some of whom came and went. It wasn't without its trials of course—a small house, too many people, and certain tensions between family members at times, but it was a household that shared stories and poetry, and valued books, all the stuff of feeding the imagination. From our parents, who—especially my mother—quoted long tracts of poetry, to a father fond of recounting gritty tales of his country boyhood, to an uncle who was a fabulist, to a grandmother who read poetry aloud, our childhood was immersed and flavoured by story and poem. Another grandmother lived in the Blue Mountains, running tearooms there, and this was a marvelous contrast to city living. Megalong Valley was the setting for many of my early "rapturous" nature poems. To wake to the smell of the eucalypt with overtones of last night's open fire, to hear the raucous song of the kookaburra and other native birds, and to look out onto the green and more green and rugged, yellowy brown steep cliffs lit by morning sun … no wonder my sisters and I delighted in our holidays there.

It was a life to which books and story were intrinsic. Our father, a young detective at the time, told bedtime stories of his boyhood whenever he was home on time to do so, but also and, maybe even more importantly for me, he was fond of reading from our old grey-covered, much loved A Treasury of Verse. In those days kids went to bed early, with the ritual of being dosed with something called Fry's Emulsion which, we were told—though we didn't believe a word of it—"was good for your system," whatever that meant. The poetry did far more good than the ghastly tasting medicine. Who would not thrill to strange, entrancing, yet incomprehensible to a small child, words like Coleridge's?

In Xanadu did Kubla Khan

A stately pleasure-dome decree

Or the opening lines of the famous Australian ballad by Henry Kendall,

By channels of coolness the echoes are calling,

And down the dim gorges I hear the creek falling

My father's readings booked no interruption and we listened intently. We would shed a tear sometimes for the dog that drowned in The Ballad of the Drover, hugely enjoyed his more light-hearted reading of a poem such as The Jackdaw of Rheims, and we wondered at the mysterious story of Abou Ben Adhem. But we never spoke a word when he gave forth those heartfelt readings.

I think my love affair with words began right there, if it didn't with mother's recitation, word perfect, of "The Slip-rails and the Spur." And of course, her singing—the truly melancholy rendition of "Come to me My Melancholy Baby" or the more light-hearted "Little Mister Baggy Britches" when our baby brother was a bit fractious. I loved this quiet time in our house but best of all I loved to hear the poetry that seemed so natural to her or so important to my dad. Something was "lit up" so that the words seemed alive and singing and powerful or playful, like the surf of Maroubra Beach or Bondi that beat out a rhythm that dramatically pounded in my bones and in my blood. Even a disliked teacher, primly reading the famous Australian ballad by Banjo Patterson, "The Man From Snowy River" (later to become a movie), had its own inexorable charm. It all lay in the poetry itself! The power of words to evoke images, to make music and to make you feel so many emotions just by their saying, the way it did, was extraordinary to me. And still is. And the particular cadence and "truth" a good poem seems to hold in some magical way.

During my lifetime—as a child of the forties, an adolescent of the fifties and sixties—I was lucky to see Australian children's literature come into full flower. In fact, the seventies and eighties, as our publishing houses began publishing local voices, is a time described as the "Golden Age" of Australian children's literature by critic and revered elder in the field, Maurie Saxby. My library teacher at Maroubra Junction Girl's School in Sydney in the early 1950s would never have dreamed of such a thing, ever tidying those shelves of largely English adventure stories such as Enid Blyton's Famous Five. Classics like Black Beauty, Anne of Green Gables, and The Secret Garden rubbed spines with only a few Australian children's texts, among them such memorable names as Patricia Wrightson, Joan Phipson, and Nan Chauncy.

But it was really the well-worn "Billabong" series by Mary Grant Bruce and the equally well-worn work of Ethel Turner's series that I read over and over, attracted by serial narratives in an Australian setting. Television was something that had happened in America and had no bearing on our lives yet. So the characters of those books peopled our childhood. Reading was all-important and we could simply never have enough books. To this day I have several books on my bedside table and always travel "heavy," taking old friends that I might need near me and a clutch of new to some far-off city or country town that may not sport a bookshop.

But harking back, we lived in a small two bedroom house in Maroubra during my early childhood, a family of four children: Margaret, Elizabeth, Suzanne and Stephen. Everything was done at the old oak kitchen table, from homework to ironing to shelling peas. It wasn't until my older sister Margi went to high school that my mother bought us our first desk, which was to be communally owned, of course, and which fitted miraculously in the verandah sleep-out my sister and I shared. To me, it was luxury to have a place set apart specially for writing, not to mention the added pleasure of a set of drawers in the desk to be filled just with the accoutrements of writing. I loved touching the packet of envelopes, the writing pads (loose sheets of paper were a rarity), the floral stationery set I had been lucky enough to get for Christmas, the HB pencils, and opening the special spotted black-and-white case that housed my precious Conway Stewart fountain pen and matching propelling pencil.

When we reached high school, each child was given a 'good' pen and pencil set, instructed that it had been expensive to purchase and was expected to last us through all our high school days. My father owned a treasured maroon and silver Parker pen and I don't remember ever seeing him with another writing implement. We never shared pens, as we understood it could damage the unique way the user had shaped the nib. But I remember practising his distinctive signature and wishing I could use his fine pen to replicate the downstroke. "Light on the upstroke and heavy on the downstroke," our teachers endlessly instructed us, endeavouring for each and every child to achieve a "copperplate" writing style.

We were all readers in that house, though I was the only writer. That is, the only child that crept away to write her own stories or poems, finding a private though darkish space behind the big tapestry lounge chair in the lounge room, in our busy and noisy household.

In infants school, we were supplied readers, each child with the same one. I'd wrestled in Grade 1 with the boredom of Fay and Don, walking down English-style streets in English-type clothes and living in smart English-type bungalows with never a gum tree in sight. However, my Grade 2 reader remains in mind as a pleasurable compilation of poems and stories, well-thumbed and well-loved. Dramatic stories about girls like Grace Darling, whose daring rescue of shipwrecked souls intrigued me, especially the idea that a girl could ride a horse into the surf and save people! And then the poems that were read aloud and "performed" in what was known as Verse Speaking—a lesson I found thrilling. Fragments of verse, and the particular intonation of my Grade 2 teacher Miss Hinder, have stayed with me a lifetime. "I shall lie in the reeds and hoooowl for your green glass beads, I love them so … give them me," and so on.

The readers were exhausted after a term and yet we were obliged to re-read around the class on a regular basis. And often the teacher requested we keep to the place, "finger on the word please" of the poor stumbling child selected to read aloud.

The introduction at home to Australian storybooks such as Blinky Bill and Snugglepot and Cuddlepie and the beloved Gumnutland host of characters was significant. Books that speak to children about the place they themselves know well, as Dorothy Wall and May Gibbs did for me as young child, must have a lasting impression, and a lifelong significance. Here among Peter Rabbit and friends, Pooh Bear and friends, and a host of Disney characters in far-flung settings, which were loved too, were stories of our own land, our bush, our city, our animals, and our flora, very much our place.

I distinctly remember the thrill of pleasure at May Gibbs' gentle and environmentally friendly Gumnutland stories, coupled with her charming Australian artwork of our own bottlebrush and gum trees and bush creatures. British books and British influence were still so strong in the 1950s, though things were slowly beginning to change in that regard, and the arts were reflecting this change, our burgeoning literature at the forefront in the naming (and thus the possessing) of things in our own landscape. This was a gradual process of relinquishing Britain and Europe as the centre of our world, and recognising our own country as an entity in itself, and Asian countries as our closest neighbours.

Having said that, much later in the 1990s it was still not easy to have children's books with an Asian theme published. I'd made plans to write a series I'd called Asiastory—six stories set in various Asian countries close to home—as a kind of interesting challenge. But it was to be more difficult than I'd imagined. The first one, a picture storybook set in Vietnam, The Wishing Cupboard, which was the first published story to go online in Australia, took six or seven years to find a publisher at Lothian. And it was only in 1999 that I had my book The River, which is set in China, launched in Shanghai through an educational publishing house, Curriculum Corporation. I've had four of the stories published to date, and am currently determinedly working on a Korean story.

*

In high school, we were steeped in English literature—from John Donne to the Romantics, our Shakespeare texts studied thoroughly over a whole year, so thoroughly we could quote whole tracts of it. There was not much modern poetry taught at school so I had to find that elsewhere. It was years later I was to discover the charms of other cultures. Translations of Spanish Lorca and Pablo Neruda, American poets like William Carlos Williams, Monica Dickens, and Hugh Langston, the Welsh poet Dylan Thomas, to mention a few.

Teachers had an enormous impact on my life right through my schooling. The shy and beautiful Miss Miller in Grade 1 (who, incidentally, I remember to this day never returned the book on China that my German grandfather gave the family and I proudly took to school, a beautiful book with the unusual treat of coloured pictures). It was important to actually own books but they were a rare treat as gifts.The ample and warm Mrs. Tanner (Grade 3) who always delayed to chat and laugh when my handsome father called to pick us up from school (a really unusual event) and who relentlessly encouraged the use of "good words." A memorable lesson was writing the words "got" and "said" on a piece of paper, going into the school garden which the kids attended to in Nature study lessons, and burying the words. "You can think of a better one to use in your compositions, girls!"

Then there was the principal, the chaotic Miss Swain (Grade 6) who loved to see the whole school march from assembly—where we saluted the flag and swore allegiance to the King of England and later the Queen—to military style music like "Colonel Bogey's March." She was generally a good-natured teacher, despite having the dual role of running the whole school. But she made what she called 'a terrible mistake' that we kids all paid for.

Every week we had to write a tightly structured two-page composition: opening paragraph, two more paragraphs using adverbial or adjectival phrases that were listed on the blackboard, and a closing paragraph that "tied off" all ends neatly. One memorable day, when she obviously hadn't had time to prepare the "strait-jacket," we were told, "Today girls, you may write an adventure story!" It was music to our ears. She did not mention any length at all, let alone an adverbial phrase.

Forty-five twelve-year-old girls, well schooled on Enid Blyton and her Famous Five adventure books and Ethel Turner's heart-rending Seven Little Australians, went to town. It was a black afternoon when our work was handed back to the class with cold and disapproving comments for each and every one of us.

At least half of us, wild with freedom, had written six or eight or even ten pages of story! She told us she refused to read beyond page three of any of them, that they were generally poor, undisciplined and imitative—well, yes! But then followed a diatribe when poor, hapless, overweight, unpopular, super-bright classmate Judith Meakin was made to stand up and explain why her "disgusting" story had featured something as horrific as murder. And not just one, this vile child had included three murders on board a launch in Sydney Harbour. She laboured the girl's inappropriate subject matter in a rage of disapproval, so humiliating that I'd have been reduced to tears. But Judith stood there, clutching the desk red-faced and, I'm certain, not understanding what all the fuss was about.

It seems laughable in this day and age of violence and death depicted on film and TV, including the news of the day, that a child writing a murder story could be so castigated. But the 1950s were the days before television in Australia, and straightlaced was the way you would describe suburban Maroubra. In any case, there was censorship about what books were allowed into the country (for example, D. H. Lawrence's Lady Chatterly's Lover could be read only by university professors even in my adolescence) and the press of the day could not refer directly to things such as a pregnancy. Poor Judith had no doubt read a diet of cheap thrillers and, in reflecting them in her own way, Libby (center), with her sisters Suzanne (left) and Margaret. took the full fury of our teacher's annoyance at the outpourings of frustrated writers. I remember thinking then that Judith had been daring and that there was surely a power in a story that could make an adult so mad!

Endorsements for budding writers must have been important. I was in Year 4 when I received my first award, a purplish certificate for my penned (this was a dip pen and ink-penned story) from a large department store, Farmer's, that for some mysterious reason encouraged young Sydney writers. I believe I still have that certificate. But it was not for certificates I wrote the poems and stories that seemed to come from some mysterious source, poured out into precious exercise books where every page was covered, paper being in short supply and thus prized.

In the incredible paper affluence of my adulthood it's almost unimaginable to think how paper and pencils and pens were prized possessions. It was a luxury to have a Woolworth's Jumbo-sized writing pad. Single sheets such as our fax and computer paper were simply not available. I knew more of British history at ten, twelve, fourteen years of age than I did of Australian history. Aboriginal history was for the most part shamefully ignored or, what little there was, often quite inaccurately presented. This was all to change dramatically when I reached college. But I must say I'm grateful to this day for that rich literary background afforded by our schools, which set up a continual love affair with writers of the stature of William Shakespeare and the Romantic poets, to mention but a few.

My sisters and I haunted libraries like the one in Maroubra with the unlikely and agreeable name of Quandong, where one paid, say, a shilling to borrow two books for a week. Later we traveled by bus a few suburbs away to the Randwick Public Library to take out our precious one book each. I was ten or eleven before Maroubra had a public library in the guise of the Mobile Library—a wondrous caravan of books that traveled some of the library-less suburbs of our area, hooking into the powerline to light up its intriguing interior and the eager knot of readers—and thus bring the demise of private libraries.

The brightness of some of those childhood memories may be somewhat enhanced by time, but images of us just being around books and readers are especially clear. Lying on the beds, long sunny afternoons totally immersed in Mary Grant Bruce's "Billabong" series, my big sister, head in a book, occasionally making a comment about the outback world and the characters we knew and loved. "I think I have a bit of crush on Wally," she might say.

"Well, I think I'm in love with Jim and I want to be Norah," I'd reflect.

"But they're brother and sister!" she'd tell me, usually having the last word.

I know as a big sister to Suzanne, three years my junior, I'd often read aloud to her. She always attests to my improving her reading comprehension, as I'd read some of our school-set novels (not my choice of fiction) such as Black Arrow or The Hill, and then each three pages or so I'd quiz her on what I'd read. "You really have to listen!" I'd threaten, "or I won't read to you anymore." Thus improving her concentration.

I love that idea of sharing other worlds and I believe that the act of reading allows us to share the dream. We can enter into another's thoughts and another's world as if it were our own.

It's strange how certain memories of a less happy kind remain imprinted. There was a procession of pets who had a great impact on the family. Though we longed to own a dog and my little sister Suzanne arrived home occasionally with a stray, we had cats and kittens! A series of cats were called variously Tiddles if male, or Skinny Minny if female. There was no commercially prepared petfood at the time, and the pets always ate the scraps from the family table and were generally more on the lean side compared to the cats I've owned since the advent of tinned petfood. With the birth of several batches of kittens, we ran out of willing recipients. Vets were not plentiful and the drowning of kittens was not unusual in our street, and was by far more merciful than dumping those hapless kittens in back lanes. But somehow neither of our parents could bring themselves to do the deed when we'd done our best but had clearly run out of prospective owners.

My mother's brother, Uncle Allen, was called to do the job. Not a particularly aggressive or bold man, he must nonetheless have had the requisite skills for kitten-drowning. It was done on the back step where all the children gathered and I remember watching with a certain amount of fear mixed with an awful curiosity. We knew it was inevitable the kittens must go or became strays, uncared for, but how could you actually kill something that was alive and soft and warm? The dark, the cluster of children, the metal bucket, the tiny squirming still blind soft little creatures, Uncle Allen grim but resolute. The hapless mother, Skinny Minny, being cuddled somewhere else, the thought of death in the air, the realization of utter powerlessness. That's a vivid memory for me.

Another stark memory was being locked in. This was a holiday with my older sister Margaret, on a farm on the Nepean River at the foot of the Blue Mountains, where boy cousins were good company for most of the time. It was a dairy farm and magical to us city girls. I didn't realize the grind of 200 cows having to be milked morning and night and the effort this must have cost my uncle and his older son. We loved to come here as the days were long and filled with fun. We learned boys' sports, bows and arrows, the wonder of an air rifle and the game of mice trapping in a recently ploughed field. Then there was riding a tractor to the Nepean River and discovering the wonder of the fact that potatoes didn't grow on bushes but were grown under the ground.

The milking sheds were fascinating and to be visited most afternoons. The cows were always docile, there was a certain exciting smell, milky in the shed and overlain with the cow manure in the yard, the sound of the milking machines sucking away at so many cows' teats—probably thirty cows milked at a time. There was the added wonder of the separation room, and then the cold room, where huge metal milk drums were stored, waiting for pickup. Bruce, my cousin, was a good-natured boy, a year or so older, but he seized the opportunity one afternoon as we two visited the cold room to experience the shiveriness once again, to heave closed the thick metal door and leave us not only shivering in the cold, but marooned in the terror of utter darkness.

Screams were to no avail it seemed, and the few minutes we were incarcerated there seared some memory of terror forever. When he gleefully opened the door and we emerged, I was changed. I was shaking and couldn't speak and remained so, despite the sun on my arms and that comforting ordinary odour of cow manure, for some time. Once again it was the notion of facing death and knowing you were powerless. And worse still, not brave. Not in the least brave. Ever since then, I have felt a kind of panic at the idea of being closed in, and like at least a sliver of light at night when asleep.

*

My first year in high school I made a very special friend in Pat who had laughing eyes, a mop of black curly hair and an outrageous sense of humour. She also just happened to live not far around the corner from my house in Maroubra—a wonderful accident of fate. Some As a young teacher, 1965. fifty years later we are still friends and still discussing some of the same issues about the arts, despite both having brought up our families separately. Ten years ago I tried to set down something of the preciousness of this relationship in my poem "Childhood Friend" from Maroubra Cycle. (Maroubra Cycle has been set to music by composer Stephen Lalor and was later performed under the direction of Paul Weingott at UTS as a musical, when I was writer in residence there).

You were farewelling me,
I saw you there
Standing by the gate
And heard your laughter
Down the midnight road
And thought
A poem is there in you
Standing, laughing
Talking, delaying, beside
The darkened paling fence
So reminiscent of our childhood.…
Where we plotted our bright futures.
—"Childhood Friend"

Pat was "artistic" and dreamed of becoming a painter and our conversations over the adolescent years were always of the arts: debates, musings as we fledgling artists tested our own theories in painting and writing in a world not much interested in two Maroubra lasses and their dreams. Pat illustrated my first picture storybook Kyo, which was the story of a much-loved dog of my mother's. Kyo, who gained this name from the New South Wales country town Kyogle, was a wonderful black and white terrier my mother swore could smile—at her, of course. Kyo was picked up by the RSPCA when she wandered off one day from Tamarama Beach; we never saw her again. My mother was inconsolable and in fact never had another dog, so Pat and I wrote a story about Kyo's wandering with a very happy ending. She was found! It wasn't even published but I have the original artwork to this day among my treasures.

I attended Teachers' College after an unsuccessful stint as a laboratory assistant in the Medical School at the University of Sydney. Two lecturers at Balmain Teachers' College—as it was then called before becoming part of UTS (University of Technology)—greatly influenced my writing: Ray Cattell who moved to University of New South Wales as I arrived) and the principal, a tall forbidding looking gentleman, Mr. Green-halgh. It was the English lecturer at Balmain who introduced me to Ray Cattell after my poem won the College Poetry Prize. Ray in turn introduced me to the works of W. B. Yeats when I unwittingly cautioned him to "tread softly" on his criticisms of my own poetry. "Tread softly for you tread on my dreams" he quoted immediately and there began a love affair with works of Yeats. Visits to his home gave timely insight to my passionate but sometimes rambling first poetry, and he insisting I could make poetry my life's work. If only I didn't have to earn a living, I thought, though poetry I knew even then would remain central to my life and inform all my writing.

The other lecturer, the principal of the college, also stands out in my mind impressing me with his far too short series of lectures on philosophy and imploring us, the young students about to embark on our teaching lives, not to "walk through the fields with our gloves on" referring to a famous poem whose name eludes me. I remember buying Will Durant's The Story of Philosophy and a whole world opening up to me.

This was intensified by the advent of a soulful and totally engaging person in my life. It's true he was a man, several years older and much more sophisticated than I, but this seemed incredibly attractive to me in itself. With him I could discuss poetry and philosophy and many an evening we sat in the rose garden in Hyde Park; he was too poor to take me to dinner and I was but a poor college student. I listened to the wisdom of John C. It didn't occur to me that when we did go out to the movies or even to coffee that it was I who paid, and it was only years later that I understood why John became attracted to a woman closer to his age who had a smart apartment and a high-paying job. Still, I never regretted his flair for romance and his rather Oscar Wildish take on life.

My school friend Pat and I had discussed classical music but were introduced to the joys of ownership through a friend's dad who'd joined something called The World Record Club. Brahms' Hungarian Dances was the first 45 classical record that I ever purchased. Dad was mad about The Student Prince, as we all were, and I played it along with Beethoven symphonies. Later came admiration for Bach—I even purchased a small harmonium from a friend, Wendy's dad, who worked at the music shop Paling's, so I could learn to play Bach's Toccata and Fugue.

Saturday mornings, the three girls were expected to do the housework which consisted of vacuuming the house, scrubbing, polishing and—as custom had it in summertime—give the whole house a good spray of Mortein Plus, which had just come onto the market, with a bright red large pump flyspray. Our work was made lighter by the stereogram, a large polished wood affair with a lid that was raised to reveal the turntable, a side compartment for 33s and another for 78s and the smaller 45s. We'd put on the long playing 33s (LPs) of which our parents had such delights as Oklahoma, Carousel, South Pacific, and Showboat. A favourite was an LP called The Merry Widow, considered classical music.

This didn't mean I wasn't in love with Elvis Presley or didn't dance to the new rock and roll and later favour the magical Beatles! My novel, Love Me Tender, reflects this time through the eyes of a young boy, Alan.

Round the corner at Pat's house, her mother had secured a real treasure of an LP, sent all the way from England, of Emlyn Williams reading Charles Dickens. Though I'd read A Tale of Two Cities I was delighted by excerpts from Pickwick Papers and Oliver Twist read aloud to us as we gathered in the lounge room around the precious record player to listen before the advent of television in Australia of course.

The bookcase in the small lounge room of our house at Maroubra was cram-packed. My parents had sets of books alongside the novels, encyclopedias, and dictionary (Webster's), a huge tome. Sets of science and philosophy (The Living Thoughts Library: of Thoreau, Descarts, Spinoza, etc.) alongside Readers' Digest series books and World War II books. These I remember were large clothbound with firm spines: Soldiering On, Army, Navy, and Air Force accounts of the returned men, anxious to somehow tell something of their disquieting stories.

Arthur Mees' Book of Everlasting Things seems such a quaint idea in a world of computers with knowledge at your fingertips. But it was a much loved tome, a book of wonder, despite its rather smudgy black and white photographs of sights such as the pyramids, or the Amazon River.

An aunt of mine was housekeeper for a very well-off family in nearby Dover Heights and this was rather fortunate for us. The Rusten girls were readers, and we only imagined their life, as we never met them. But in a way I thought we had, for their names were often inscribed in the books that came our way. The Rustens gave our aunt the entire set of Billabong books by Mary Grant Bruce, doled out on birthdays and Christmases to eager recipients; twelve or fourteen of them that were published in Great Britain by Ward Lock. Some rather trashy love stories such as Broken Wings by F. J. Thwaites found their way onto our shelves, made all the more meaningful because of the fact that our mother admitted she had once or twice gone out with him when he was a young man.

Shy the Platypus by Lesley Reece was another treasure. I was to later meet Lesley at the Fremantle Children's Literary Centre in 1997, and to learn that as a young journalist he'd actually interviewed James Joyce in Paris.

My story The Day TV Came was published by the Museum of Contemporary Art when it opened to an exhibition celebrating the coming of television to Australia in the 1950s; though fictional, it tried to capture some of the wonder of film on tap in one's own house. Our television, like our record player, was a substantial piece of furniture—two wooden doors in a cabinet with fake gold handles, opening to reveal a screen below which giant knobs conveyed us to worlds beyond our world, albeit in black and white. When our family bought a television in 1959, we were transfixed by any and every program. Sunday nights were family occasions when we gathered for a TV dinner generally, toasted tomato and cheese on specially designed TV plates, either made in a waffle iron or in our Dad's new-fangled griller. Bought from a door-to-door salesman, the Spaceship, so named for its shape, could grill anything to a crisp, from sausages to sandwiches. One of the features of Sunday evening viewing was Disney World and eating toasted "samos" as our Dad called them, toasted to perfection on the Spaceship. Or during the week watching exciting American shows like 77 Sunset Strip, The Fugitive, Maverick, I Love Lucy, or Father Knows Best. There were very few Australian shows. Homicide, the first cop show, comes to mind as well as a copycat Saturday afternoon Bandstand where you could watch people your own age rock and rolling—and even get a ticket to go out to Gore Hill and become part of the audience that was filmed! If you were brave enough.

*

As a young woman I began writing poetry, hesitatingly at first given the models of such accomplishment I'd had. I was drawn to write about what I knew, events and landscapes and people and all the strange yet somehow "ordinary" miracles that Walt Whitman so cleverly describes in his poem of that name. Poetry writing was a major pastime but I began keeping notebooks, fragments of conversation, dreams, reflections. I remember a line of poetry I wrote when I was eighteen years old that said though I, too, longed for Europe, I wanted to know my own country and that henceforth I was "stepping out into Australian times."

In a lustful search for a diversity of texts after my school years and whilst at college, I began consciously exploring Australian literature, particularly poetry. The work of Judith Wright, David Campbell, John Shaw Neilsen, Chrisopher Brennan. I still keep a raggedy copy of that very first Penguin Anthology of Australian Verse that introduced to me to the wealth of Australian voices. Later at college I began to explore more contemporary voices, the likes of Les Murray, Gwen Harwood, Elizabeth Riddell, and Peter Porter. The wonderful old bookshop on Pitt Street in Sydney, Angus and Robertson's with its polished linoleum covered basement where poetry and plays resided, became a place of miraculous discoveries. As did the magical little Rowe Street with its first coffee shops and book shops and records imported from overseas for which you'd have to save to buy.

Translations by Arthur Waley and Ezra Pound of Chinese poetry, and that extreme jewel of verse, the Japanese haiku, were discovered in Rome Street. This largesse, along with the newly translated novels of European authors such as Gide and Mann, Camus, and a whole range of Russian novels from Tolstoy to Chekov Dostoyovsky. My head was hardly ever out of a book and it was a wonder I graduated from college at all. When I did I was to discover the real joys of teaching and must say that my first year at Bankstown Primary School was a year of wonders. Despite the rigours of the timetable imposed then (thirty minutes for this and twenty-five for that, and woe betide you if you didn't teach the said subject at the said hour) I found I could encourage poetry writing with my nine-year-olds—45 of them in a room designed to take up to fifty pupils! This was 1964 and classes were large.

I remember distinctly the exciting drives to Bank-stown Primary School (a long train and bus ride from my home at Tamarama Beach) with my new friend Wendy Stites. She was a young teacher at Bankstown Infants who was lucky enough to own a car, a VW Beetle, with whom I shared petrol money and long conversations. We talked of life and love at length being young women at the time, alongside the joys of art and poetry, and how we could influence the kids we taught. She was later to marry Australian filmmaker Peter Weir and devote all her creative passion to design and wardrobe for movies.

At this time I was going out with a young medical student, Ron Gray, of Polish parentage (his mother had promptly changed their name on arrival as a migrant to Australia) who shared this love of the arts and especially of poetry, and gave into my hands some treasure tomes from his own bookcase. I still have the poetical works of Rainer Maria Rilke he parted with somewhat reluctantly, because I'd told him the book was not to be had in any Sydney bookshop and I loved the work so much. Forbidden movies in Trade Union Hall (Quiet Flows the Don) or "continental movies" as we called them, like Virgin Spring or La Dolce Vita at Savoy, Lido, or the Paris Theatre, where at interval there was the luxury of buying Italian coffee, were part and parcel of the discovery of "other times." Ron was an extraordinarily clever fellow academically, but I remember his frustration at not being able to paint or write poetry and sometime a flash of annoyance when I'd produce some writing about a place we'd visited together—the fir forest where we'd camped or the Blue Mountains where we'd taken long bracing walks. He was a loving person to me and I am glad to have had such a strong and tender relationship over three or four years of growing up time. But it was through him I realised that understanding and loving poetry or fiction was not enough, that there was another dimension that has nothing to do with the will, and that perhaps in some miraculous and inexplicable way, writing had chosen me!

I broke my medical student's heart when after four years and with our inevitable marriage in sight, I met John Hathorn, a teacher seven years my senior, dashing, romantic and persuasive. But there was grief for me too, in that break, as I felt Ron was part of my most formative years and intoxicated though I was with John's energy and excitement, there were moments of real longing to see Ron again.

My own writing in that time consisted of largely unpublished poetry. I remember the thrill of first acceptance in The Poetry Journal, then managed by poet Grace Perry, of my first poem. This coincided with meeting John, my husband to be, at the school I'd been transferred to, Bellevue Hill Primary School. In those first heady days of our relationship I expressed my desire to be a writer—and a published writer at that!—and explained that it was central to my life. After we were married in 1968, John Hathorn, being a practical soul, suggested that I begin my foray into publishing by writing textbooks. We worked together on the first little books for infants and then I decided I'd write up all the marvelous work the children were capable of in poetry, and Go Lightly, my first substantial book, was published. As I was not fully confident to "go it alone," John was actually listed as co-author. He had, after all, I reasoned, trialed all the poetry techniques written up in the book.

The birth of my children, daughter Lisa in 1970 and then Keiran in 1973, changed our lives once again. I could not think about writing, especially children's books, in the same way. Bringing up children enlivens your perceptions and memories of your own childhood, feeding the fires.

The seventies saw a new confidence in the arts that we all responded to. We'd left behind to some extent the "outback image" that had been promulgated through books and movies, and began to record our urban and indeed our multicultural experiences as wave after wave of migrants settled into the cities, impacting on the Australian way of life. It seemed to young artists un-burdened by the weight of a long European history that we were free to go in any direction. But Australian children were still largely invisible in the body of literature available to them and I think myself lucky to have been writing at the time that publishers acknowledged that "gap."

I had been a classroom teacher but moved into the role of librarian in the primary school where I worked now at Drummoyne, a significant move on my part. Librarianship suited my addiction to books and story and gave me an up-to-the-minute overview of what children were reading. I was very much aware that we needed books about our place, the city as well as the country. I read hundreds of books and was delighted by some Australian novels by Colin Thiele and Ivan Southall, some early Australian picture storybooks like Lydia Pender's Barnaby's Rocket, and the Aboriginal tales The Rainbow Serpent by Dick Roughsey.

Engaged to John Hathorn, 1966.

Looking back, there were two particular writers I discovered in well-stacked shelves who I think deeply influenced my own writing. A series of readers by the English writer Leila Berg, which told hilarious stories of working class kids and their parents, opened my eyes to the way ordinary folk could be written about and also to the fact that ordinary folk were not really well represented in Australian children's literature. And then the work of the Dutch writer Meindert de Jong with his wonderful novel, Journey from Peppermint Street, and for younger readers Nobody Plays with a Cabbage. These were sensitive stories written in spare and beautiful prose and they truly inspired me. I also noticed at this time some very "cool" paperbacks books for struggling readers by a certain Paul Jennings were being very well borrowed from the library. Paul was to become a legend in his own lifetime with a series of hilarious novels some years later.

*

It all happened at a party, whose I don't recall, but I was introduced to a young man who worked for an English publishing company, Methuen, who had an office in Sydney. And yes, he'd talk to the children's editor there about a book I was writing.

Stephen's Tree was my first picture storybook. It was set at my brother's then garden market in Waverley, a veritable rainforest of ferns and trees and Australian plants right in the heart of the suburbs. I was thrilled to have a work of fiction underway but I had to debate long and hard with Methuen about having a gum tree central to the story. They strongly advised a beech, ash or elm so the work would sell better in England! It was important for me to have the gum tree but it was equally important to be published.

My first children's book editor, the gentle but resolute Liz Fulton, must have argued well, for a gum tree it was! The book was launched at our local Waverley Library by Peter Weir, who'd already begun to make his name with his first movie, Picnic at Hanging Rock, and all Sandra Laroche's delicate depictions of gum trees and kids were exhibited. The book attracted much media attention not only because it was about an Australian tree but also because Stephen's Tree was a publishing experiment. The publisher, responsive to our multicultural society of largely Greek and Italian migrants, published Stephen's Tree in dual text versions, both Greek and Italian! This experiment was repeated with Lachlan's Walk. Though the books sold well in the English version, the dual language was not a great seller and sad to say, the idea of dual texts was canned!

This connection to Waverley Library for my first-ever book launch was auspicious. Sandra illustrated my next children's picture storybook Lachlan's Walk, set at Watson's Bay and based on a true story about my sister's son Lachlan wandering away from home towards a dangerous cliffside park. It too, was launched at Waverley Library by cartoonist Bruce Petty. And it was to be there at the library that I became aware of the outstanding work of illustrator Julie Vivas through enthusiastic children's librarian, Roniet Myerthal. Julie had an exhibition of her watercolours and after I'd seen her work, Roniet arranged a meeting where I invited Julie to illustrate my next book The Tram to Bondi Beach, to be set in the 1930s, the time of paperboys and trams in Sydney. Julie assured me that her art was not suitable for children's literature, but I thought differently and asked to show some of her work to my Methuen publishers, who immediately agreed with me that she would make a fine partner for the text. Julie had a tough time of it family-wise the year she undertook her superb illustrations for the story, her first picture book, for her husband was away in Spain and she had two small children to look after. We visited the Loftus, the Tram Museum south of Sydney, to get reference photographs because by that time, in 1980s, trams had disappeared from the Sydney streets. Here the children Ana and Kate, along with my children Lisa and Keiran, acted as models for paperboys and passengers. The Tram to Bondi Beach, launched by Maurie Saxby, was highly commended by the Children's Book Council of Australia, and Julie's new career was begun. The then NSW Film and Television group wanted to make a movie of Tram with its setting in the Depression in Bondi. I wrote the first filmscript filled with hope about the possibility of Julie's marvellous artwork and my story, but it was to be one of those many movie projects that only "almost" came off.

During this time in the seventies with two children and a teacher-librarian career, I was fortunate on the home front to have the help of a wonderful woman my mother's age who came to stay for three weeks and stayed instead over a period of twenty years. Without Paddy's help, her organisation of household matters, her sense of humour and her winning ways with little children, I could not have given such time to my own writing. She became a treasured family member at our house and though elderly now, is still interested to hear every scrap of information about our children, Lisa and Keiran.

Back in the eighties as my own children were growing older—though it's true I'm forever interested in picture storybooks—I began to write "chapter books," or what we called junior novels, for young readers. All about Anna, which recalled my Maroubra childhood and was where I consciously placed a girl as an adventurous main character, won honours in the CBA awards. This was followed by a fantasy, The Extraordinary Magics of Emma McDade, the first of my short novels to be translated into Korean, and was similarly short-listed for awards. Paolo's Secret in 1985 was written to portray the loneliness of some children in the school yard when limited by language. As a teacher-librarian in an inner city school I was very much aware of this situation for shy children who found the prospect of the playground daunting. But the novel that was to change The author's children, Christmas, 1979: (front) Lisa and (back, right) Keiran, with their friend Isabelle. my life in the late eighties, and indeed take me all the way to Hollywood, was written for young adult readers and was strongly inspired by the bushland setting of the central coast of NSW.

Thunderwith was written in 1988 on my brother's farm in the Wallingat Forest, which is north of Sydney. This is the story of the loss and alienation of a young girl Lara, as she has to come to terms not only with the death of a beloved mother, but with a dad she barely remembers and a hostile new mother. Its setting is uniquely Australian and when my agents Curtis Brown offered it for publication, in 1988, the $10,000 advance paid by the publisher Heinneman was then considered the largest ever given in Australia for a children's book.

Immediately there were offers for movie options from three Australian companies and it was finally optioned to Southern Star Xanadu. Sandra Levy (currently the head of the Australian Broadcasting Company) was the producer of Xanadu then, and I would have been more than happy to work with her as she had such a sensitivity to the story, but there was to be a lull in movie-making which meant it was difficult to get finances together. In the meantime, Thunderwith the novel travelled well into Europe, being bought in Holland and Denmark, Sweden and Great Britain, then was also published in the United States and was serialized in India. It went into reprint several times in its first year, picking up honours in the CBA awards, too. But it was the offer by Hallmark Hall of Fame in the United States in the late nineties to make a television movie, and to have me as the writer, that was the most exciting news for this story. Several meetings in Hollywood with producer Dick Welsh indicated that they wanted me to write a treatment for the movie placing Gladwyn, the mother, central to the story. This was because their demographic was largely adult females, they told me, and for family viewing. Armed with some how-to-write-movies guidebooks back home, I took off to Seal Rocks and the Wallingat and began the arduous task of writing a movie script to please my producers. Later, American writers were brought on to finish the script and though I was disappointed, I knew I'd reached a time when I simply couldn't make any more changes and still feel it was my story.

Simon Wincer, as director, had chosen Victoria, his home state, rather than NSW where the story is actually set. My husband John, who had become ill with leukemia, had been under heavy treatment and though in remission, had little energy at this time. He encouraged me to take our daughter Lisa and visit the set. It was amazing to go on the set at Mt. Beauty in Victoria to see a whole property changed, roads built, a farmhouse and outhouses constructed, palms planted to create a plantation, a dam built, to mention just a few of the wonders that happened. Judy Davis played a marvelous Gladwyn and was nominated for an Emmy for her performance in The Echo of Thunder, as it was called. Lauren Hewitt made a strong Lara and Emily Browning (later starring in Lemony Snicket) made her film debut as an engaging young Opal. Thunderwith today is still one of my best-selling novels and is a set text in many schools across Australia.

*

In the mid-nineties John had retired from school and we traveled widely, including living in a loft in Mulberry Street in New York, whilst I made better contact with my then agent Laura Blake at Curtis Brown. During that time I met Little Brown's Maria Modugno who had taken both Thunderwith and Grandma's Shoes, and later Simon & Schuster's Virginia Duncan who had taken Sky Sash So Blue. Virginia, moving to Greenwillow, was to hand over to Stephanie Owens Lurie but told me in a farewell letter that Sky Sash was the best children's story she'd ever worked on! Stephanie was incredibly enthused and put Benny Andrews' wonderful artwork for the cover of Sky Sash on their S & S catalogue. Whilst in New York I also visited the office of the legendary Margaret McElderry who told me how she'd enjoyed reading Thunderwith. It was a great visit, at the end of which came the American offers for the movie of Thunderwith.

Another book that had a huge impact was my picture storybook Way Home. It was inspired by the sight of a boy in the underground in London who was begging at the bottom of the giant escalators. He seemed incredibly young to be there alone. I boarded the train and began thinking of my own children safe and sound in a Midland farmhouse, and wrote a poem about a boy called Shane that was to become the basis of the text of Way Home. Mark McLeod, who was a publisher with Random House then, loved the text and magically brought the illustrator Greg Rogers and me together. We traversed the streets of Sydney taking photographs as source material and then Greg returned to Brisbane, where he worked over his amazing artwork that was to win the much-coveted Kate Greenaway Medal in the United Kingdom.

That it was an Australian artist illustrating and Australian text has always amazed and pleased me. It also won a Parents' Choice in America. Praise for the book in Britain and the United States, where it was also published, was high. Luminaries such as Jeremy Briggs and Anthony Browne had positive things to say about it, and after meeting Anthony at an Australian conference, he invited me to send a text I might think suitable for his work. The reviews for Way Home in Australia were not generally good, and it garnered no honours here in any award. But the book has remained in print ever since and is a set text in many schools. The theatre company Barking Gecko produced a play I'd written based on the book with music by a composer Stephen Lalor, whom I'd worked with over the years and who has set much of my children's poetry to music. It remains one of my favourites. At the same time, taken up with the reports I was reading on homeless kids around the world, and surprised at the number in Australia, I wrote Feral Kid. This is a young adult novel about an older boy who is homeless, and it was to be optioned by Hallmark Hall of Fame, as well.

On our travels, John and I lived in Holland for a few months in a wonderful apartment on the Prinsengracht found by my Dutch publishers at Ploegsma. There we met the delightful Nanny Brinkman, at this time still the head of the company, and her husband Paul, who gave us much of his time in showing us Holland. Nanny had taken my novels Thunderwith and Feral Kid and later The Climb. Their own house on the Kaisergracht, a huge former merchant's home, was a wonder to us with its ample beautifully furnished rooms and its rooftop garden with views of Amsterdam all around.

I was inspired at the Vincent Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam to write my novel The Painter, based on the imagined life of an adolescent would-be painter, Bernard, who meets Vincent in Arles and whose life is changed by this encounter. Every morning I'd get on Writing Thunderwith in the Wallingat Forest, 1998. The author with her husband, John, in Monet's garden, Giverny, 1996. the tram to the museum whilst John hunted antiques and, in the library there, undertake the delightful task of reading Vincent's letters, and then viewing letters that the offspring of his models had written and so on. John and I felt we could have stayed in Amsterdam forever. I had previously signed a six-book contract with publishers Hodder Headline in Australia, and my novels were in the hands of a wonderful children's publisher Belinda Bolliger. I still consult with Belinda on all my work and trust her judgment particularly when it comes to editing.

Picture storybook texts are the closest thing to poetry for me and I'll always want to write them. But it is a pretty amazing thing when they move from picture storybook to opera. Grandma's Shoes, which was published in Great Britain and the United States and has been published twice in Australia with two different artists (one of Belinda's choice), was to become the first children's opera performed in Australia in the new millennium. This is the story of a young girl's search for her grandmother, wearing her precious shoes, and deals with the loss of a beloved family member in a consoling way. There is even an air of triumph for the little girl as she pledges to take up her grandma's storytelling skills.

Not only did I approach Opera Australia with the story text and the idea for an opera, but through my editor at Oxford University Press, Rita Scharf, I had an auspicious meeting with Kim Carpenter, director of Theatre of Image. Kim loved the text and encouraged me to write the libretto. He introduced me to Graeme Koehne, an Adelaide composer whose work is known world-wide. We gained support from Opera Australia by way of musicians and singers, rehearsal spaces and advertising. Grandma's Shoes had a Kim Carpenter setting of a giant book out of which stepped all the characters, and his puppets and backdrop of animations made it a truly wonderful performance. It played to full houses and later I was thrilled to receive an award from the AWGIE (Australian Writers Guild) for this libretto. And later to receive a Prime Minister's Millennium Award for 2000.

Opera is expensive and difficult to mount so it was with some delight in 2003 that I received an invitation from Alabama to have my text for my picture storybook Sky Sash So Blue, published by Simon and Schuster in 1998 in the States, used as libretto. This picture story-book, embellished so lovingly by the artwork of Benny Andrews, is a celebration of freedom; it was inspired by reading Toni Morrison's powerful novel Beloved and is set in the same period of slavery in the deep south. The invitation was from a music lecturer at Miles, an all black college, in Birmingham, Alabama. Phillip Ratliffe had plans for a children's opera using the text already written in verse.

We undertook a long correspondence by e-mail and eventually Philip announced that not only had he almost completed the opera but that he'd secured the funds for its performance in November, 2004. The visit, which enabled me to see the rehearsals and the calibre of opera singers and chamber orchestra, was an exciting one, for it was my first experience of the south. But I must admit that on first hearing Philip's startling atonal music I wondered how young people—some as young as Grade 2—would respond. However, a group of teachers using Maxine Green's music, of the Lincoln Centre reputation, as an inspirational aesthetic education model had fully prepared their students.

So on the day of performance around 700 African-American students enjoyed the opera with its sparse set and accomplished singers and the use of a long, trailing sky sash of deep blue. In 2005, I had more correspondence from Phillip, to indicate Sky Sash will be performed again. This has been made possible by the Cultural Alliance and the Division of Humanities at Miles College, with in-kind donations from the Birmingham Museum of Art, UAB, Midfield Schools, and the Alabama School of Fine Arts. Miracles do happen!

*

I have been fortunate over the years in invitations to speak in other countries and often am asked if this is the stuff of inspiration. If it's true that settings do have a huge impact, you never know whether you are going to be found by a story no matter how dramatic or how different the landscape. My initial visit to Papua New Guinea visit was to launch the first ever PNG Children's Book Fair in 1994. After a tour of some of the schools in Port Moresby, accompanied by an Australian journalist who lived there, I was taken to various island schools and touched by the enthusiasm with which a writer was greeted in schools that often lacked libraries and were even sometimes short of notepaper. On the volcanic island of Rabaul, viewing the terrifying outcome of the 1993 eruption and talking to the locals, I was inspired for my verse novel Volcano Boy, though it wasn't to be written until many years later. The following year in 1995, I was invited to run a writing course on the marvelous island of Madang in Papua, New Guinea, and had my first experience of snorkeling in a truly tropical place. I couldn't wait for my workshops to be over, to run helter skelter to my cabin, change into swimming gear, and spend hours, head in the water, in a world that was dramatically lovely, strange, and inspirational. At home, my son, who had undertaken a scuba diving course, had enthused about the underwater world being a great subject for a novel. And it was strange that after a cult leader in California had enticed a group of his followers, some of them quite young, to commit suicide together, and I'd seen a video of his "explanation" to them, that all these things came together in the novel Rift.

An author tour organized by the Australia Council in 1997 took revered Australian writer David Malouf With authors David Malouf and Gillian Mears, Chennai, India, 1997. and Gillian Mears and me to India for a marvelous three weeks. Visiting bookshops and universities, we had speaking engagements in New Delhi, Bangalore, Madras (now Chennai) and Bombay (now Mumbai). We were met by writers in each of these places and had two each of our own books launched there by Senator Alston, the then Minister for the Arts. The impact of India on the tourist has been attested to many times. Suffice to say we were enthralled by the diversity, delighted by our hosts, upset by the poverty that was so apparent, and yet charmed by the generosity of those we met. However, we were so programmed as to never get to see the Taj Mahal, something I'd always dreamt of visiting, and where I was sure a story would be lurking. One fortunate connection I'd made was with a printer at an ashram at Pondicherry famous for the quality of the paper it produced. To and fro communication indicated they'd do a limited edition of a book of my poems on specially chosen paper of a generous thickness, with petal impressed endpapers and a handmade binding in Hablik cloth.

Invited to speak at the prestigious IBBY (International Board of Books for Young People) Conference, which was to be held in New Delhi, India, I returned the next year in 1998, this time with my friend Pat and my two sisters Margaret and Suzanne, who had heard my enthusiastic descriptions of this exotic culture. This time, after IBBY, I determined to make the journey to Agra as well as one to the equally famed Lake Palace. India simply seduced us as we moved from place to place, dazzled by all we saw and especially the Taj Mahal which was all and more than I'd expected.

I'd met a charming publisher at IBBY and was invited to present my text set at the Taj Mahal to her Libby Hathorn with her son, Kieran, and daughter, Lisa (holding baby Ruby Rose), Dorrigo, New South Wales, 2004. small, brave children's publishing house, Tulika Books, just getting underway in Chennai. A Face in the Water is a timeslip story which takes a historic view of the building of the Taj and stars the daughter of the emperor Shah Jahan and two present-day Australian kids. It was illustrated by a young Indian artist Uma Krishnaswamy and published in India in 2000.

We visited Pondicherry and the ashram where Heard Singing was to be printed on hand-made paper. Australian paper-cutting artist Brigitte Stoddard's delicate work in Australian wildflowers graced this limited edition. Brigitte eventually illustrated my junior novel, Okra and Acacia: The Story of the Wattle Pattern Plate, based on the Chinese legend "The Story of the Willow Patter Plate," which was published by Hodder Headline. A wonderful hand-sewn hessian wrapped bundle of poetry books eventually arrived in Sydney from India and it gave me a great deal of pleasure to have seen the whole process and to know that I had been able to influence the look and feel of Heard Singing. Gifts were made of the book, some were sold and it remains a favourite book on my own shelves.

My husband John died in 1998 when leukemia he'd contracted in 1996 re-occurred. He had been fighting it for two years and his bravery in the face of a bone marrow transplant was amazing, though so difficult to witness, even though he remained positive in the face of all his trials. I've tried to write a book about our last overseas journey together in 1997 between his treatments, where we lived for a short time in a magical chateau in Normandy, John collecting antiques whilst I wrote a filmscript; but somehow that book is still unfinished.

There have been some big life changes in that time both at home and in my work. Both my children are with partners and in fact I'm a grandmother to a baby girl, Ruby Rose (inspiration for storybooks of course). My son Keiran working in Information Technology has inspired me to work on interactive stories. Our small company has released two CD-ROMs thus far. The first one, Weirdstop, which comprises stories of the weird variety for ten-to fourteen-year-olds, immediately won the Australian Interactive Media Industry Award for Best New Children's Product in 2003. Coolstop which links sport and literacy was launched by an Olympic medallist in late 2004, and we're currently working on a game and story for younger readers we've called Wonderstop, which is environmental in approach. A whole new world of writing and producing has opened up.

This does not mean that I'm not writing story books. My historic novel Georgiana is still underway, as is a new picture storybook; whilst last year saw the launch of children's picture storybook The Great Big Animal Ask by film producer Rebel Penfold Russell. I'm also working on a poetry Web site, which is a long overdue project with notes for parents and teachers as to how to "turn kids on to poetry!" You see, poetry has rewarded me in every possible way. Writer Shirley Hazzard has attested that poetry changes things. And there's no doubt in my mind that those early poetry sessions with our parents, the reading and the reciting, always having poetry books to hand that illuminated my world, and taking on poetry as a significant companion has been the greatest influence on my writing, and indeed on all of my life.