Gardening Australia – Where to Begin story

In 2021 I was on Gardening Australia, getting some advice from Jane Edmanson about the basics of growing things in my community plot in St Kilda. The segment was replayed in 2024. You can watch the story here: https://www.abc.net.au/gardening/how-to/where-to-begin/13577212?utm_campaign=abc_gardening&utm_content=link&utm_medium=content_shared&utm_source=abc_gardening...

When Did You Call Yourself a Writer?

28 years of diary keeping helped me realise I was one On my seventh birthday I started a diary, a tiny blue book with hearts on the cover, my stories — mostly about my love for Shauna the Grade 1 music teacher, and detailed descriptions of the lollies I bought with my pocket money — kept safe by a heart-shaped lock. These diaries have accumulated over the years. The physical ones — before I started storing my thoughts in a...

A stressed white female teacher sitting at a desk with her head in her hands

I Had to Become a Chinese Teacher to Discover the Writer Within

At 32, returning to Australia after a year studying Chinese in Nanjing, I embarked on a teaching course. I had come to the reasonably-late-but-not-too-late-in-life realization that teaching was my true calling, despite pushing it away for many years. Not that the other things I’d been doing were wrong, but that here was the perfect profession for me, something that would use all my skills, that would be rewarding, useful, helpful, and hopefully, fun. Oh yeah, and that would pay me...

Our country needs good teachers. I am not going to be one of them.

“That’s not going to be me,” I sniffed, as I read the statistics. Half of all new teachers leave within the first five years. But not me. I was different. How smug I was. Five years? I barely made a term. At 31, after a career in international development, managing projects in Papua New Guinea and Vanuatu, I took a break and spent a year studying Chinese in Nanjing. I would indulge my inner Rudd and brush up on my...

Down and Out in Bath and London

Once upon a time, two Australian girls lived in a cupboard above the stairs, in a town called Bath, in a country called England. The girls were best friends. One was Liz and the other was Isabel. Liz and Iz. This is a true story and it happened ten years ago. Liz and Iz met at high school, and afterwards, went to Melbourne Uni together. After the first year of their Arts degrees, they decided that they needed to go...