Article: My Country Childhood

There’s an article in this month’s Australian Country Style magazine, written by Claire MacTaggart, about my childhood on Tamborine Mountain. It was such a lovely piece to be involved with – the older I get and the more I write, the clearer it is to me how enormously my childhood experiences influence the way I see the world. Anyone who’s read The Secret Keeper will recognise the Tamborine Mountain of my memory in the chapter featuring Vivien as a girl: running down to the creek, hiding under the ferns, watching the summer storms roll in – these are my experiences, just as they belong to Vivien. But it is more than that, too. It seems to me now that the landscape of childhood – the experience of place when we are growing up – becomes an inextricable part of a person and the palette of their imagination. For my part, I know that even my novels that aren’t set on the mountain are informed by the things that I saw and felt and smelled and heard and thought about as a child, and are therefore very much related to the place that I called home.

***

You can read the article HERE.