My Writing

How It all Began

 

I’ve always loved reading from the time I learnt around the age of four or five.  I read myths, fairy tales, legends, and encyclopaedias as a child. When I was eight and in boarding school, if the class had a spare ten minutes at the end of a lesson, the teacher would ask me to come to the front of the class and tell them a story. I had so many of them to tell from the many things I had read.

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 As I grew into my teens, I began devouring more history books and historical fiction, science, science fiction, speculative fantasy, religion, classic novels, poetry, philosophy, and pretty much anything that expanded my knowledge and hopefully my understanding of the world and the people in it, and how and why things were the way they were.

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Around the age of twenty-three, I began to write, and the first story I wrote was published! In Woman’s Day. I know now that doesn’t happen very often. It was a story called “Black Lily” and you can read it further on. the story was published in 1965, in a special holiday fiction section along with stories by Agatha Christie, Pearl Buck, and an unknown author called Robin Green. (That was me.)

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I left Australia not long after that, lived and travelled in many countries, and forgot about the writing. I never stopped reading though.

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When I returned to Australia, in 1970, my friend Annette Canterbury (AKA Tulku Rose) showed me a curriculum book for teachers of early reading she had written and published. She planned a series but had run out of puff and asked me to co-author more in the series. We wrote the books, William Brooks published them, and I had caught the bug.

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You’ll see some of the many things I have written and published since then, as we go along: articles, stories, books. Mostly non-fiction. But let’s have a look at a few. Your choice.