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CRIME FICTION NOVELS


AUSTRALIAN THROUGH AND THROUGH

WITH

INDEPTH COMPLEX CHARACTERS
GREAT STORY HOOKS
and
UNEXPECTED CONCLUSIONS


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I was born in Hopetoun, a tiny town the Mallee area of north-west Victoria in Australia and lived the first half of my life on a farm with my family. Life was tough, no electricity, money or entertainment but lots of hard work as we were all expected to help on the farm and in the house.

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Unfortunately I was born with a invisible disease called Hashimoto's Thyroiditis an inflammatory autoimmune disease for which no cure has ever been found. I looked like a big robust healthy child but as I grew I was always tired, with aching joints and limbs. I found it hard to focus and when other kids were still full of energy all I wanted to do was lie down. As well, my immune system was so challenged when I started school that I caught every bug going around. Numerous days were spent at home recovering and I fell further and further behind in learning to read and write. 

 

But that was not my major problem. Even though I tried as hard as I could and listened intently to my teacher, phonics and word recognition simply made no sense to me and my progress was pathetically slow.

 

When I had to repeat Grade 3 because I could not read or write, I was so ashamed and upset. Mum and Dad had their own problems so there was little sympathy or help coming from them, except for......

       'You had better pull my socks up, my girl, or you'll  end up being a ning nong and a no-hoper.' 

I didn't know what a ning nong was but I sure as heck knew it  sounded pretty awful. 

After Dad's prophesy I spent a lot of my time trying to figure out how I could avoid it.

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But  I remained not only hurt and humiliated at having to repeat Grade 3, I was as angry as a hessian bag full of half drowned kittens. And I was damn well not going to accept that I was DUMB....... because I knew I wasn't!! I could figure things out like, measurements, money, adding up, taking away, multiplication and even long division.  As well times tables were easy for me, so why couldn't I learn to read, spell and write? 

 

It wasn't until, many years later, when I was at teacher's college that 'dyslexia' was a word catching everyone's attention. And when I found out what it was, I knew that was what had been my problem. Moving on a few years to when my daughter, now a Research Scientist, working in oncology, showed signs of dyslexia, I tried so hard to give her the help I was never given. Years passed  with intense research into what caused Dyslexia enlightened me. Diagnosis of auditory agnosia which was the inability to recognize or understand sounds, even if the physical hearing is intact. And after that Cortical deafness was diagnosed as a similar issue where the brain could not process auditory signals, resulting in a lack of hearing despite the ears functioning normally. Then I found out about oculomotor dysfunction which Google describes as any problem with eye movement control, affecting tasks like reading, writing, and tracking. 

 

​Ha, ha, begad and begorrah!!...... YES... finally.... as a grown mature women I had finally figured it out why  was unable to  learn to read and write like the other kids. I was no longer' thought of myself as 'DUMB' 

 

But I transgress..... just how did I manage to learn to read and write when I was only eight years old.? 

 

 In my childish mind that the one thing I knew I had that was above average, was my memory, so I looked for other attributes in my personality of which I had lots of

 1.my dogged determination, 2.my great memory 3. my absolute desire to achieve and 4. my utter stubbornness - to never give in, and never give up, no matter what.

 

But the year before I figured all this out  we were our house burnt down when the kerosene fridge blew u . Devastated, the last things on Mum and Dad minds was my need for books to further my plan. So every day, I would sit and try to read the simpler words in the the Sun and Weekly Times newspapers Dad had delivered twice a week to the farm. ​I had my school reader which I read each evening,  after which,  I would sit at the kitchen table in the light of the old Hurricane lamp and try to read from the newspapers whist mum  prepared the evening meal, spelling out the words to her I couldn't sound out or decipher.  Little by little that unknown number of words decreased and my reading slowly improved.

 

 The other thing I decided would be a great help to my reading and especially my writing was using my excellent memory to become aa....... 'you beaut' top speller. So each evening after I went to bed I would memorise, the shape, the sequence of the letters of my ten words on my daily spelling list and repeatedly spell them over and over until I fell asleep. The next morning at the school if I didn't get one hundred per cent correct  I would, as soon as I arrived home, practise writing them until I did. Over time I became a 'word nerd'. And when I went to boarding school my entertainment was after I finished my homework to scroll through my dictionary, all the time testing myself on  spelling and discovering the meaning of recently acquired words. And it worked.......

 

I can read and I can write AND  I think, damn well. 

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In adulthood I went on to become a primary school teacher, teaching mostly on a casual basis in many Mallee rural schools, after which I became a farmer's wife and partner in running a few thousands acres of wheat and sheep for twenty three years. It was during this time that I went back to what I had loved as a child, drawing and eventually painting seriously  learning all I could about Art from books on loan from the library bus that came to out tiny town once a month. I had three beautiful children, then after leaving the marriage and the farm, due to continual episodes of  domestic violence I decided to go on an 'art crawl' around the world educating myself about all facets of art, visiting artists' studios, fine art printers, print manufactures, exhibitions, and so much more  as I drove myself across Canada and the USA in a 1974 Ford Econoline Van I called 'The Radisson'.  Wow, what an amazing trip that was. During that time I spent a large amount of time on Vancouver Island and British Columbia, not realising that I would one day write the above Book 3 of my trilogy  called "On the Wings of a Dragon Fly" about that fascinating beautiful place.

 

After six months instead of the planned twelve months, I returned home to Australia because an Art Gallery I had hoped to buy had finally come on the market. After I bought Kerry Anne's Akoonah Park Gallery I spent four years having the privilege of promoting many of Australia major artists, writing editorials and advertising major Australian artists, writings editorials, designing advertising and promotional articles for many regional and city magazines and papers.  Working seven days a week, caused my  Hashimoto's to become dangerously high and my energy levels to drop drastically so I decided to down size, sell the real estate and move the business/gallery into Toorak where "Kerry Anne's Fine Art'  traded until I met my 'good husband,' Paul. 

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Back in 1993 when I first left my marriage I turned again to writing poetry and began to write my first novel about my life in the Mallee involving years of domestic violence, with few women's rights and constant generational male  bigotry and  dominance . It went through numerous titles until I settled on "After Dark Comes Light". Unfortunately, threats from my ex 'to sue the pants off me' forced me put that novel to rest to wait for a better clime further down the track. Then in 2005 I began writing my trilogy called 'Thieves of Innocence."​